PAIN & ASPIRINE

HOW  DOES ASA FIGHT  PAIN ?

Aspirin, acetyl salicylic acid, known also as salicin, is  considered  wonderful and labeled  “the wonder drug” according to  many writers. Among the four signs of inflammation described  in Roman times by Celsius, 30 AD, namely: redness, heat, swelling and pain, in Latin: rubor, calor,  tumor and  dolor ,aspirin continue to address the most important one which is dolor.

Dolor, in English pain, tells us about “any physical feeling caused by disease, injury or something unpleasant. As usual, pain is transmitted to the brain as an information or a signal that something is wrong in human  homeostasis. The messengers aware of this imbalance are the ending nerve about which  Wikipedia writes : Free nerve ending ( FRE)  is an “unspecialized afferent nerve ending meaning it brings information from the body’s periphery toward the brain.  Any FRE  functions as cutaneous receptors and are essentially used  by vertebrates to detect pain.

Acetyl Salicylic Acid act at this level.  How so?

By reducing the productions of prostaglandins and thromboxanes and binding to an enzyme named cyclooxygenase,( COX), required for prostaglandin and thromboxane synthesis, aspirin  plays a key role. Prostaglandins are local hormones (paracrine) produced in the body and have diverse effects in the body, including but not limited to transmission of pain information to the brain, modulation of the hypothalamic thermostat, and inflammation As an acetylating agent “where an acetyl group is covalently attached to a serine residue in the active site of the COX enzyme, aspirin stops and reverses the  pain process. Put shortly, a former Nobel Price Sir John Robert Vane  summarizes  these steps  in a few words: aspirin achieves its goal by blocking the production of prostaglandins.

Next time you get some pain, think about aspirin as  your angel guardian.  Thromboxanes are synthetized in endothelial cells lining our vessels and end up sometimes building up dreadful clots. Thromboxanes are responsible for the aggregation of platelets that form blood clots. There also, aspirin doesn’t give up. A blood thinner, aspirin fights on as well. As so, it becomes over the years the main drug to prevent heart attack and stroke.

Never had preventive medicine relied on such a weapon.