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.
