Does This Help Account for the Acute Modern Social Discord?
(And, perhaps, for the relatively recent rise of the hard-hearted woman?)
To repeat, while I was reading about the different non-pharmaceutical workarounds to COVID19 prevention and treatment over the last month and a half, a couple of biochemistry-related ideas crossed my mind that might help to explain both the chronic, and the more recently acutely increasing, antisocial, ‘nonhuman’ behavior being evidenced by more and more people in ‘first world’ countries since the 1960s. Note that both of these potential, biochemically-based causes of human discord would be entirely unaffected by the usual human propensity to try to iron out conflicts by bickering and fighting about the various ‘issues’. Indeed, both of these potential biochemical causes could be some of the ultimate sources of the human propensity to just bicker about, rather than cooperatively work to solve, shared problems facing homo sapiens.
One of those ideas was previously explained here, and ascribes the historical chronic existence of a background level of human social discord to a simple but ramifying and accumulative biochemical change that begins to develop in aging humans just at the start of their middle-age; i.e., at the beginning of their greatest cultural and social influence and responsibility. This change very often reaches its peak in the years just before natural death with a personality and life marked by highly developed self-centeredness, mental confusion, aggression, desire to quarrel, weakness, reduced physical mobility, and emotional disturbances.
The second idea occurred to me while reading research about the side effects of acute and chronic deficiency in the major human cellular antioxidant, glutathione. As it happens, there are a large number of mental disorders causally associated with glutathione deficiency -- apparently because this antioxidant serves to moderate the glutamatergic system that plays a major part in controlling the balance between neuronal excitation and inhibition taking place in the central nervous system. See Berk et al., 2013, for a review. Among other things, glutathione supplementation using NAC has been tested with some success as a method of improving autism symptoms like persistent irritability and poor interpersonal social awareness.
You might recall that the oxidative stress that comes from living through time within an oxygen-rich atmosphere itself results in a gradual cellular and extracellular depletion of glutathione stores. This fact, juxtaposed against the biochemical deficits determined to be associated with autism, suggests another potential source of the persistent irritability1 and poor interpersonal social awareness that comes to gradually afflict many people as they age.
Age and associated oxidative stress are not, however, the only depleters of good-behavior-maintaining glutathione. Overdoses of the NSAID variously called paracetamol, acetaminophen, APAP, or ‘tylenol’, rapidly destroy the glutathione stores of human livers, leading frequently to acute and fatal liver failure. 2 In western countries, ‘tylenol’ poisoning is the most common cause of drug overdose. Note here that the medical antidote to paracetamol-acetaminophen-APAP-tylenol poisoning is glutathione-restoring NAC.
Given the association of some forms of autism with a glutathione-depleted, unmoderated glutamatergic neurotransmitter system, some researchers have hypothesized that the gradual rise in frequency of autism in the world is directly related to the substitution of glutathione-depleting ‘tylenol’ for pain- and fever-reducing aspirin in babies and young children. In the US, ‘tylenol’ became available as an over-the-counter drug in 1960. See the graphic below, and the references provided at the end of the graphic-containing article, for more discussion and explanation.
The following graph shows that ‘tylenol’ use, despite its clear physical and its probable mental health risks, is still increasing year over year in the Nordic sample of modern western countries. Perhaps tellingly -- given certain recent (1960s on) cultural developments related to marriage -- most ‘tylenol’ use is by women of all ages. Not until very late in life do men begin using this particular NSAID to any appreciable extent.
As already remarked, chronic conditions like autism and – in some people – old age, are marked by lack of social awareness and irritability symptoms like aggression, tantrums, self-injurious behaviors, and anger. That there is a possible connection between the acute display of such characteristics and ‘tylenol’ is suggested by research described here. Title of the paper is “From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain”. The authors state that their:
“…findings suggest that the physical painkiller acetaminophen reduces empathy for pain [of others] and provide a new perspective on the neurochemical bases of empathy. Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of adults in the United States each week.”3
Recall here the altogether too common indifference shown towards the health and welfare of others during the early and ongoing course of the COVID19 kerfuffle.
Humanity’s use of ‘tylenol’, then, might well just be yet another case of modern homo sapiens shooting itself in the foot. Aspirin, with a use history of up to 40,000 years, seems a far better bet for most older youths and adults – and for children older than three not suffering pain and fever from chickenpox or flu-like illnesses.
Which can be manifested by aggression, tantrums, self-injurious behaviors, and anger. See https://www.academia.edu/29170417/Modulation_of_glutamate_receptor_functions_by_glutathione
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol Eventual, non-acute liver failure is also associated with frequent use of this particular NSAID.
See also the authors’ later paper found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6455058/
I persoinally found attractive women hard-hearted towards me....
The dark background is hard to read!