I am sure this sounds fairly out there but I have had the test where they determine if you have trouble metabolizing certain medications. I definitely have trouble. Some won't metabolize. Some metabolize at the speed of light and so on.
Once upon a time I could research very well. I am not doing so well now but when I mentioned the trouble with medications to a gal who goes to a fundamentalist doctor she immediately asked about a test for food. Does anyone know if there is such a test? If anyone knows of such a test would you know how long it has been out and how accurate it would be.
Considering the amount of scams out and my lack of medical knowledge and doctors lack of knowledge I am rather in an area I cannot navigate well.
If anyone has any knowledge I would appreciate any information.
Thanks
There is a test and they may have more than one. The test measures then speed the medication cycles through the liver. There is an enzyme or maybe more than one that helps control the metabolism of medications and how much is absorbed. My neighbor lady had Sjogrens and RA and she had problems absorbing meds and really had problems when she had surgery as she did not metabolize the pain meds.
I think this would be a good testing for you to have as meds play such a big past of our treatment. This way you will know more what works. I would think that a big clinic or teaching hospital would be able to connect you with a specialist that does this testing. Good luck. Let us know how this goes. I am betting there are people on this forum who have some of this same problem. Irish
Well, it just so happens that a big component of my day job is assessing how the body metabolizes drugs.
As Irish noted, there is a genetic test that you can take that will help assess your potential to be a slow or fast metabolizer of certain drugs that are metabolized by a select number of drug metabolizing enzymes. As background, there are a broad range of enzymes in the body that can metabolize drugs. Every drug is metabolized by a different subset of enzymes. For example, hydroxychloroquine is metabolized by cytochrome (CYP) 2D6, 2C8, 3A4, and 3A5. There are known genetic variants of some enzymes that result in individuals having a high or low capacity to metabolize drugs by that enzyme. Good examples are CYP2D6 and CYP2C19. There are also genetic variants of other types of metabolizing enzymes (N-acetylation, glucuronidation, sulphation). In order for a drug to be susceptible to genetic variants, it must be extensively (typically primarily) metabolized by one of these enzymes that has slow/fast genetic variants. There are many drugs that fall into this category, but overall, they represent a small fraction of all the available drugs on the market. You can order a genetic test for the CYP enzymes that are polymorphically expressed (our way of saying that there can be fast or slow metabolizers) but only a few of the many CYP enzymes have slow/fast subsets. You can also do a genetic test for N-acetylation, but there are not many drugs metabolized by this pathway.
There are no tests that I am aware of that test for general drug metabolizing capability. In general, there is no relationship between how quickly your body metabolizes food and how quickly it metabolizes drugs - they use different enzyme systems and, short of major hepatic injury that affects all enzymatic processes, they would not be expected to correlate (at least I have never seen any research that indicates that).
Here are a few links to drug metabolizing tests (I have no relationship to any of these labs/tests - there are many more options - I just grabbed the first couple that showed up on a search):
CYP Panel:
http://ltd.aruplab.com/Tests/Pub/2013098
Broad panel
https://www.gdx.net/core/sample-reports/Detoxi-Genomics-Sample-Report.pdf
Gord