Your stomach plays a central role in how effectively pills are delivered to your body, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When you’re in pain and you reach for a pill do you think about how your stomach is going to handle it? Now a new model developed by Johns Hopkins engineer Rajat Mittal and colleagues helps predict how long you may have to wait for relief.

The center of everything is this model that we’ve developed, this computational model called StomachSim. It’s a model that basically tries to recapitulate the biomechanics, the fluid mechanics, and the anatomy and physiology of the stomach. The StomachSim can simulate various aspects of the function of the digestive system, dissolution of a pill, as well as digestion of different types of foods and posture and diseases such as gastroparesis can affect the way the stomach functions.  :31

Mittal notes that gastroparesis, where emptying of stomach contents is delayed, is just one condition that can affect how well pill contents are absorbed into the body. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.