Expired Medications: Drugs past the "best before date" may lose potency, but how soon?
Medications past best before date may lose potency, but how soon? | Canadian Healthcare Network - Pharmacists:
Excerpt of key points from the article:
"Suggesting it’s better to be safe than sorry, Emberley [Phil Emberley, director of pharmacy innovation at the Canadian Pharmacists Association] advises consumers to cull any out-of-date drugs from their medicine cabinets and take them to a pharmacy to be destroyed.
Dr. David Juurlink, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, said concerns about diminished potency depends on the drug and how much time has elapsed since the best-before date.
“For most drugs, the passage of a short amount of time after the expiry date is really of little clinical consequence,” he said. “In general, something that’s six to 12 months past the expiry date, with rare exceptions, is not going to be a problem at all. They’re not going to be dangerous.”A 2012 study of a small number of drugs—some of them bottled or packaged 40 years earlier—found that active ingredients did degrade over time, but some more than others. For instance, researchers found ASA pills dropped in strength from 200 milligrams to two milligrams, while codeine barely lost any of its chemical constituents.
“It’s not like milk, and it’s not as though something magical happened on the expiry date and the drug loses all of its potency,” Juurlink said. “With most, but not all, it’s probably safe to take drugs that have expired recently. But the more time that has elapsed from the expiry date, the less advisable it becomes.”
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