Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Drug tolerance story..



Baru balik dari InventQ.. Bosannya hari.. Penuh dengan presentation.. Just feel frustrated a bit because my presentation on 'behavioural tolerance' concept was mentioned as incorrect or inaccurate..

Well maybe I'm wrong but what I said was not based on my own assumptions only.. It was based on searching and reading that comes out with possible explanation.

Based on my understandings, behavioural tolerance happens when a person double up his/her drug dose to achieve the desired effect. Behavioural tolerance is experienced when the person consumes the drug chronically; which means take continuously from time to time.

Due to that chronic consumption, more receptors for the drug appears in the central nervous system. As the result, this person needs to increase the dose to achieve what he/she needs from the drug; therapeutic action or getting euphoria ('high') for drug abuser.

The simple example that I gave was paracetamol. There are people who are easily get headache and tend to take paracetamol to relieve the pain.

However, with continuous taking of paracetamol, maybe after 1 year of chronic use of paracetamol, 1g of paracetamol is not anymore sufficient to relieve the headache. Maybe this person needs to increase the dose up to 1.5g paracetamol per administration to feel better.

Which I supposed this to be one of the characteristic of tolerance to paracetamol (1g paracetamol is just not enough for the person). So this person feels that he/she needs to add up the dose. That person behavior towards paracetamol consumption is the 'behavioral tolerance' in my eyes.

However, this statement was told to me as wrong, and nobody felt I was right. The argument is, paracetamol does not cause tolerance. Paracetamol is the safest drug, even can be given to pregnant women.

Maybe paracetamol does not listed to be one of the Central Nervous System to be discussed, however, I do think that drug tolerance can happen to anyone when it is used chronically.

This is based on my searching, and I found that:


In above statement, it shows that Paracetamol really works in central nervous system. This indicates the possibility of drug tolerance to occur when paracetamol is used for chronic exposure.

Furthermore, I found that Tramadol can develop tolerance due to long term use. Please refer to the link below to read about the article:


Tramadol contains 325mg of Paracetamol.

Maybe the occurrence of behavioral tolerance in paracetamol is rare, but to say it will never happen, I don't really agree because a drug is still a drug.

Well, I'm not trying to prove that I'm right here. But I write just to present my ideas and understanding about my presentation based on studies and references.

Most of all, it's ok to be wrong because I'm in the learning process.

As Prof Hatta taught me that, wrong answers are appreciated.

Let's smile always, and open our hearts to accept knowledge. =)

Thanks for reading. =)

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