LIVE SCIENCE - Your skin color may influence how safe and effective a given drug is for you, a new analysis suggests.
In a recent think piece, published Oct. 9 in the journal Human Genomics, scientists examined a plethora of studies, revealing that melanin — the pigment that gives our skin, hair and eyes their color — can absorb certain drugs that are either applied to the skin or taken orally, thus affecting how much of a dose makes it to the tissues that need treatment.
This means that people's responses to a standard dose of a given drug may vary depending on their skin tone. For instance, research has shown that nicotine binds to melanin and that variations in skin pigmentation may influence how much people smoke. This may be because, once nicotine is inhaled, it travels through the bloodstream and is absorbed by melanin-containing cells in the skin, therefore reducing how much of the drug reaches the brain. However, the exact reason is not yet fully understood.
Toxic chemicals, such as those found in fertilizers and pesticides, may also accumulate in higher concentrations in darker skin than in lighter skin, the researchers found. This could reframe what a standard safe-exposure level might be for certain demographics.
In the think piece, Sophie Zaaijer, a consultant and researcher affiliated with the University of California, Riverside, and Simon Groen, an assistant professor of evolutionary systems biology at UC Riverside, noted that melanin's ability to interact with specific drugs was flagged back in the 1960s. However, they argued that its effects have not been properly considered in preclinical research or in clinical trials of new drugs.