Pharmacokinetics is a science that detects or tracks how medicine moves inside your body after you take it. When you swallow a pill, like for a headache, pharmacokinetics helps us understand how your body absorbs the medicine into the blood, sends it to where it needs to go, breaks it down, and finally gets rid of it when it’s not needed anymore. This helps doctors figure out the right amount of medicine to give and how often, making sure it’s safe and effective in making you feel better. This way, the medicine does its job just right, helping you without staying too long or not long enough.
Alcohol, generally ethanol, is available all over the world in the forms of all cultures, societies, and even religious beliefs. Knowledge about alcohol and its metabolism in the human body goes beyond the corpus of medical and legal practices to inform individuals about their consumption. This paper has examined alcohol pharmacokinetics, i.e., how the body absorbs, metabolizes, distributes, and eliminates alcohol while demonstrating the factors that influence those processes.
The Journey of Alcohol in the Body
Adsorption: When alcohol is introduced to the stomach, it swiftly diffuses out from the stomach into the small intestine, and it quickly diffuses into the blood. There are several factors that affect the rate of adsorption. Adsorption happens much faster on an empty stomach since food acts like a physical barrier slowing down the rate in which alcohol reaches the small intestine. To this end, the amount of alcohol taken determines the absorption. For instance, carbonated beverages are absorbed very fast, and a person gets drunk very fast.
Distribution: Once alcohol enters the bloodstream, it is miscible in water, rapidly dispersing throughout the body’s water spaces. However, because of this equal distribution, alcohol concentrations are generally spread throughout the body fairly evenly. A person who has a higher percentage of fat than water will have more alcohol concentrate in his or her blood than a leaner counterpart with a higher body water composition.
Metabolism: Alcohol is metabolized, primarily in the liver. In this system, alcohol can be metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase into a toxic metabolite called acetaldehyde, which is further catabolized through other enzymes, thus converting it into acetate. The acetate is then converted into water and carbon dioxide, which are expelled from the organism. Alcohol metabolism by the liver is limited to only a certain amount per hour, irrespective of the amount ingested hence, heavy drinking may cause higher blood alcohol concentrations and increased intoxication.
Elimination: While most of it is metabolized by the liver, some is excreted out into the breath, sweat, and urine without being changed. Elimination of alcohol in the body is an ongoing process that the body will continue to metabolize and excrete alcohol as soon as the body ingests alcohol.