It turns out that ibuprofen has anti-androgenic effects. This paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is fairly dense reading, and I'm probably not going to get the rest of the way through it, but the upshot appears to be that ibuprofen may be one of the causes of declining male fertility, and it definitely interferes with hormone production in adult males.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/01/03/1715035115.full...
A word of warning on ibuprofen. It can elevate blood pressure and mess with livers, so it's nothing to be used regularly as an intentional anti-androgen. However, when you have a headache, or sore back, and are going to take something anyway, maybe this new scientific news will influence your analgesic choice.
Comments
May create more problems than it solves
I took some ibuprofen along with the spiro I was prescribed and the combo messed with my kidneys to the point that my doctor pulled me off all meds while my kidneys recover and then had to change my testosterone blockers because I could no longer tolerate spiro.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Ibuprofen and the Liver
AFAIK, it is a lot less harmful to the Liver than Paracetamol. That can do permanent damage to the liver which is unique in that it has tremendous powers of recovery. Overdoses with Paracetamol often leads to liver failure and without a transplant, you die.
I am not a doctor but I am going on what doctors have told me when advising on the use of both.
Samantha
Is that what happened ? ...
After a crushed C-6, Neck Vertebra in 1974, I healed up enough to return to work in a couple months, with constant pain, though I worked on until 2003. In those years, I took drugs in that family by the bucketful, sometimes 3200 mg and a few Vicodin a day. I wonder if that was one of the contributing factors to the demise of my life?
In pretty good health now but know that pain drugs are to be feared and have severe consequences ...
I won't touch Ibuprofen or anything in that format,
As even small amounts tend to cause me to have dry mouth. The more I use it, the worse the dry mouth gets. It's really hard to get through a day when you darn near can't swallow anything because your mouth is totally dry. Been there, done that, don't want the t-shirt.
I can't use any ASA type meds, as I will throw up every single one of them up within fifteen minutes.
That pretty much limits me to acetaminophen (paracetamol in UK), which may be even more harmful to the liver.
I don't even use that, as the amount I would need for just daily pain quite seriously exceeds the maximum allowed per day.
Doctors here won't allow me to get anything stronger, so I'm stuck dealing with it though sheer stubbornness alone.
At the moment, I'm on Lyrica for the Fibromyalgia, but it's still early stages, I'm at 125 per day total, 75 in the morning, 50 at night.
Med interactions
When I was first diagnosed with my vasculitis I was given a whole shedload of drugs, some of which were to counteract the side effects of some of the other drugs. Go figure.
Being a nosy kind of person I read through ALL the instruction leaflets. Some of the claimed possible side effects to some drugs I'm certain are just lawyers covering their butts; personally I didn't have almost any side effects from any of the things I took.
BUT... and here's an important but! Some of those things can interact quite seriously with ibuprofen-class drugs. I was warned never to take anything with 'fen' in the name, and I have stuck to that. When I had a recent problem that required pain meds - which I hate, by the way - I ended up with a codeine derivative instead. Now those are real happy pills and I think I only took about three and returned the rest, for fear of finding them too useful.
TL;DR Moral: Read ALL the literature which comes with EVERY drug you take! You just never know what may interact.
We had a story here about a parent who tossed the instructions that came with his son's meds... and they interacted with his morning graprefruit with 'unexpected' results (Only unexpected if you don't frequent BCTS, that is). You just never know what might happen.
Penny
One quite useful morale of that story was...
... Don't eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice if you are on any kind of meds.
Grapefruit interacts with strange, dangerous or unpredictable results with most of the heart meds, many pain meds, and most other drugs. And very rarely it is mentioned in the leaflet.
Interestingly enough, there's
Interestingly enough, there's mention to another study from 2009 that ibuprofen briefly boosts certain testosterones. (just did some quick research).
This study seems to talk more about affecting the testicles themselves, and the associated drop in fertility, than any sort of true anti-androgenic effect. The mention is also made that acetaminophen and aspirin can have similar effects, but less extreme.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.