The paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen or acetaminophen or p-Acetylaminophenol, under its many trade names, is one of the most used analgesics for pain, either mild or moderate. A painkiller that is used, sometimes, very lightly and that, like all drugs, has its side effects.
The latest discovery was very unexpected. The journal ‘Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience’ has concluded that taking paracetamol affects the psychological processessuch as the perception or assessment of risks when making decisions.
The research was carried out on a sample of 500 university students in which it was shown that those who had taken paracetamol were at higher risk when deciding compared with those who had received a placebo. The conclusion he has led is that taking this analgesic reduces anxiety, promotes mental relaxation and, at the same time, the ability to foresee possible dangerous consequences or simply unwanted from an action.
At the same time, they also detected that taking paracetamol made them less susceptible and irritable to eventual negative responses, but they also lost a certain empathy and were capable of behaving more hurtfully towards their peers without considering the consequences. Namely: empathy was lost.
more risky
Among other experiments, a balloon was used that inflated little by little. Those who took the longest to release it due to the possibility of it exploding, before or after they did, were mostly those who took paracetamol.
“It may be that as the balloon gets bigger, those taking the placebo feel an increasing amount of anxiety about a possible burst. When the anxiety becomes too much, they end the test. Acetaminophen can reduce this anxiety, leading to increased risk-taking,” they explain in the study.
The implications of this study have yet to be seen, especially since they estimate that 25% of the population takes paracetamol every week.
“Reducing risk perception and increasing risk taking could have important social effects. Many areas of daily life require making decisions that involve the processes examined here. For example, many hospital patients have acetaminophen in their systems when presented with risk information and asked to perform potentially life-changing risk assessments, such as whether it should or do not perform invasive surgery», they report.