By Did you know that the time of administration of drugs influences their therapeutic response and their effectiveness in your body?
Chronopharmacology is a relatively new concept. It is related to the biological rhythms that govern our body and how these can affect the body’s response to drugs.
Physiology, as we say, is regulated by certain rhythms, but so is pathology. That is, diseases also have their patterns in time, just like biological processes.
The aim of these studies is to achieve a rational use of medicines that will lead to improving their effectiveness in the treatment of different pathologies.
What is chronopharmacology?
Chronopharmacology is a branch of pharmacology that studies the impact of the time of administration of drugs on their therapeutic response in our body and, therefore, on their efficacy.
It is based on chronobiology , which is the study of biological rhythms and their influence on physiological processes. According to this, there are three types of rhythms that govern our body:
- Circadian: rhythms of around 24 hours . These are the most studied. The most common example is sleep/wake.
- Infradian : greater than 24 hours or of low frequency. An example is the menstrual cycle which lasts approximately 28 days.
- Ultradian : less than 24 hours or of high frequency. They occur more than once a day and their duration can be milliseconds. An example is the heart rate or breathing. Another example may be the secretion of both hormones and neurotransmitters.
As we have mentioned before, just like our body, pathologies also follow certain rhythms over time. These patterns can also be related to day and night or to the seasons, among others. We can see an example of this in depression or in disorders such as hypertension or rheumatoid arthritis.
Is the effect of drugs governed by time?
It is well known that the effect of drugs on our body depends on many factors and is influenced by different variables, both internal and external to the individual. One of them, perhaps not as studied, is the temporal variation in the administration of the drugs.
The development of chronopharmacology has opened a new field of study and has made it possible to study how biological rhythms influence different aspects of the action of drugs in our body:
- Depending on the time of administration, some drugs can reduce their toxic effect and increase their efficacy. This is the case of certain anti-tumor drugs or drugs with a narrow therapeutic index, such as carbamazepine, lithium or valproic acid .
- In other cases, the variation in the functioning of the digestive system throughout the day determines the absorption of the drugs. The same occurs with the renal system in the elimination of the drugs, for example.
- The functioning of the enzymes responsible for metabolism is not the same at all times of the day.
- Some drugs interact with their specific receptor with greater or lesser affinity depending on biological rhythms.
There are currently some drug presentations on the market that follow release systems based on chronopharmacology . This is the case of drugs formulated to be released little by little over time or after a certain number of hours, for example.
How can chronopharmacology help us?
Studies on the variability of pharmacological response depending on the time of administration of drugs can provide great advances in the rational use of drugs .
Administering each drug at the most appropriate time will increase its effectiveness and reduce its side effects. It is as important to achieve effectiveness as it is to achieve safety .
Chronopharmacology may also allow treatments to be further individualised to better adapt them to the conditions of each patient and each pathology, which may also vary over time.
Further studies are still needed in these areas before the concepts of chronopharmacology can be applied regularly in the usual treatments of patients. The aim is to adapt medicine to the biological cycles of individuals in order to improve its efficacy and safety.