>>13618561>Who do some medicines work differently for different races?(bear in mind "race" is biologically speaking pretty complex because each race encompasses a lot of genetic variation itself, yada yada yada)
>Opioid MetabolismOne of the most common scenarios in which a patient's race will be considered is when giving Opiods. Generally speaking, Blacks metabolize opioids, like Morphine, faster than Whites. Whites metabolize it faster than East-Asians.
>https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22941849/>Asian GlowAnother famous example is the phenomenon called "Asian Glow", where Asians experience more intense hangovers when consuming alcohol due to the fact that they carry a less efficient variant of the enzyme Aldehyde Dehydrogenase.
The metabolism of alcohol (ethanol) by humans can be formulated as Ethanol (1.) -> Acetaldehyde (2.) -> Acetic acid -> excretion.
Because of the enzyme deficiency in Asians the 1st step, converting Ethanol into Acetaldehyde, is slower resulting in the accumulation of acetaldehyde in the body. This produces the extreme hangover symptoms in some Asians.
The reason behind these phenomena is that drug metabolism is dependant on the type and activity of enzymes. The gene-allele variants coding for these enzymes are not distributed equally across all "races". And not only the clearance/excretion of drugs (which impacts the efficacy and duration of a drug's therapeutic effect) is different, there can also be difference in things like cell receptor density, differences in binding proteins, etc.
