The authors touch on potential wider implications in the abstract:
> These results suggest that APAP should be used with caution by women attempting to conceive. Given that cell division is fundamental to all development, further investigation is now warranted to substantiate these findings and to elucidate possible implications for other developmental processes, such as gonadal and brain differentiation.
Painkillers like ibuprofen are NSAIDs which inhibit the enzyme COX1/2, reducing prostaglandin production.
Prostaglandins are an inflammatory hormone that do a variety of things, but specifically PGE2 plays a role in muscle stem cell activation to divide and produce more muscle fibers. The effect is probably realistically small, but you will leave gains on the table by taking ibuprofen after hard workouts.
Are you saying that lifting weights makes more muscle fibers? I was under the impression it does not, that it simply makes your existing muscle fibers bigger and stronger.
The whole point of working out is to stress the organism in order to induce a physiological adaptation. Inflammation is NOT the point, but rather an unfortunate side effect.
Interesting, I didn't know. My original question was more about whether that affects muscle gains differently though, do you happen to have any insights into that?
The vaccine-autism smoking gun that Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. heroically tried to find has, so far, failed to turn up. But there was a study recently that showed that autism is correlated with the mother taking acetaminophen during pregnancy.
> Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. heroically tried to find
I'm not sure if that was supposed to be sarcastic, but these two people have done more harm to public health, and are responsible for more health dis/mis-information, than pretty much anyone I can think of. (I am a biochemist, no conflict of interest)
In gp’s defense—I interpreted their formulation to suggest vaccine skeptics applied effort to an heroic degree/amount, not that the effort was of heroic virtue. That is, that those people applied ridiculously high levels of effort to searching for an effect, and still did not find an effect.
As distinct from the retort that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”: It can be, if you’ve tried hard enough to gather the evidence and come up short—which is what these guys have done.
Yeah that was my charitable reading as well, but with the incredible prevalence of anti-vax/vaccine skepticism, you can never be sure. I thought clarifying could be helpful!
I wonder if it might also slow healing of wounds, or wherever else intense cell division happens.