Scientists Just Had a Breakthrough In Understanding Tylenol

If you’ve ever sought an over-the-counter solution for pain relief, odds are pretty good that you’ve reached for Tylenol at some point. It’s been something of a pharmaceutical mainstay for 50 years, and was first approved by the FDA 20 years before that. And yet it turns out that scientists are still uncovering new details about how it affects the body — and what’s helped make it so ubiquitous over the last half century.

On June 4, the journal PNAS (or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) published a paper which notes early on that the “mechanism of action remains unclear” when it comes to paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen and sold under brand names like Tylenol and Panadol. This paper goes into greater detail about how this drug’s metabolite, AM404, interacts with the nervous system to effectively reduce the pain its user is experiencing.

“If the results of this study are confirmed, then it significantly changes our understanding of the drug,” Macquarie University professor Nial Wheate told LiveScience’s Clarissa Brincat. In the same article, Brincat pointed out that the study focused entirely on rats’ reactions to paracetamol — hence, the need to attempt to see if the same effects are true in human subjects.

The researchers’ findings suggested — at least for the rats studied — that AM404 can block painful feelings from traveling elsewhere in a body’s nervous system.

If You’re Taking Aspirin to Prevent a Heart Attack, You May Need to Stop

A U.S panel says the side effects of taking low-dose aspirin for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease may outweigh the benefits

In an article about over-the-counter painkillers published last month, The New York Times‘ Erica Sweeney wrote that acetaminophen “is dispatched to receptors in the brain and the spinal cord, but what it does from there is a little more mysterious.” With this paper, that mystery is one step closer to being cleared up.