(no subject)

[phosfate]

Mom left behind a giant jar of St Joseph Children's Asprin in the medicine cabinet. It's good until, like, 2015, so I'm trying to use it. But it's very strange to choke down 6-8 tiny pills every time I get a headache. I know that one day, I'm gonna swallow wrong and one's going to go straight into my brain.

Comments

[kamiki-seto.livejournal.com]

Good until 2015 probably only holds if it's unopened. Opened aspirin does degrade pretty quickly. If you sniff the stuff and smell vinegar or a salad-dressing type odor, then it's time to throw it away.

This message brought to you by the Useless Facts Nurses Know committee!

[aldenmacrae.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good to know!

Excuse me, I have to go sniff some aspirin bottles. (The sad thing is, I am not joking.)

[ymfaery]

Does this apply to other OTC drugs as well, or just aspirin?

[kamiki-seto.livejournal.com]

Just aspirin produces that odor...other drugs break down differently

The chemical name for aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. (This is why it's so hard on the stomach.) When aspirin breaks down, it breaks down into acetic acid and salicylic acid. Exposure to moisture and humidity are the most common causes of this breakdown. (Not good to keep aspirin in a humid bathroom.)

Acetic acid is vinegar.

So if you smell vinegar in an aspirin bottle, it's a sign the aspirin has started to break down chemically. It won't hurt you to use - but it won't be effective and it ends up being much harder on the stomach.

Aspirin is so cheap anyhow that it's not worth keeping if there's any suspicion it's started to break down.

The stuff has a fascinating history....neat article on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin

[finabair.livejournal.com]

I'd be inclined to believe the expiration dates, for the most part. No harm in sniffing your drugs if you want to, but I wouldn't worry too much.

Expiration dating on drugs, at least in the US, is usually very conservative. The FDA is very particular about labelling of drugs, and in order to put a date like 2015 on the label the company has to have done a variety of studies to show stability for at least that long under various conditions. (Usually the actual expiration date is stepped back significantly from what they've shown stability for at typical room temperatures and humidities, in fact.)

Simply opening the bottle should not affect stability overly much by itself, and if it did, particularly since aspirin is an over-the-counter drug, the FDA would almost certainly require that to be stated on the label - that the expiration date is ONLY in unopened bottles. I haven't seen any aspirin labels like that, but I don't usually use all that much aspirin myself.

Opening the bottle *might* be a problem if you exposed the aspirin to very high temperatures and humidity - while 'dry' drugs often have very long stability, liquid forms almost never do, and heat and humidity will start to dissolve exposed surfaces of the aspirin tablets, so that would change things. It also would depend on what chemicals you exposed the aspirin to when you opened the bottle - airborne chemicals can react with a drug.

Mind, aspirin probably does merit particularly long expiration dates in part because the degradation products are not considered poisonous - we eat vinegar all the time and salicylic acid, while harder on the stomach than acetylsalicylic acid, was used for many years as a medication by itself. So what the companies and the FDA would be mostly concerned with would be potency or efficacy. But they'd still want a fairly high percentage of the main drug still present at the expiration date in order to allow the labelling like that.