Ambiance

YIKES! Statins could make you more aggressive . . .

January 14, 2020 at 4:14 pm (By Amba) (medicine)

. . . and Tylenol could make you less empathetic, among other unsuspected and uninvestigated emotional and behavioral side effects of common drugs:

 fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans have shown that the same areas of our brain become active when we’re experiencing “positive empathy” –pleasure on other people’s behalf – as when we’re experiencing pain.

Given these facts, Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy. Earlier this year, together with colleagues from Ohio University and Ohio State University, he recruited some students and spilt them into two groups. One received a standard 1,000mg dose of paracetamol, while the other was given a placebo. Then he asked them to read scenarios about uplifting experiences that had happened to other people, such as the good fortune of “Alex”, who finally plucked up the courage to ask a girl on a date (she said yes).

The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. Though the experiment didn’t look at negative empathy – where we experience and relate to other people’s pain – Mischkowski suspects that this would also be more difficult to summon after taking the drug. . . .

“[T]o be honest, this line of research is really the most worrisome that I’ve ever conducted,” he says. “Especially because I’m well aware of the numbers [of people] involved. When you give somebody a drug, you don’t just give it to a person – you give it to a social system.” 

Mitigating factors:

• “Technically, paracetamol isn’t changing our personalities, because the effects only last a few hours and few of us take it continuously.” But it’s good to be aware of the effect, so “you don’t . . . take paracetamol [ahead of] a situation that requires you to be emotionally responsive – like having a serious conversation with a partner or co-worker.”)
• The same brain centers that host empathy govern both physical and emotional pain, so “paracetamol can make us feel better after a rejection.”
• SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac markedly reduce the Big Five trait of “neuroticism” (“epitomised by anxious feelings, such as fear, jealousy, envy and guilt”) and make people more extroverted.