I asked this same question to my cousin who's a pharmacologist. Her answer was essentially it truly means very little for the vast majority of medications. They do slowly degrade after a while as the active ingredients break down over time. However most medications don't go bad like food and won't harm you if you take them post expiration. They just won't be as effective. THAT is why the expiration date is there. It's the drug company saying "we no longer guarantee the effectiveness of this drug after this date."
Correct. Unless the medication is a children's antibiotic, an eye or ear medicine, it's unlikely that its effectiveness is compromised too much, but effectiveness will drop over time due to the active chemical in the medicine degrading. Nothing is meant to last forever.
In terms of kids antibiotics, eye drops and ear drops, they're in liquid, which has higher risk of bacterial contamination once opened. Liquid antibiotics have a shelf life of 2 weeks, eye/ear drops for 30 days. We cannot guarantee there is no bacterial contamination after that time, as these medication formulas do not have safeguards for contamination.
Pills/capsules last longer, as they're sealed in foil. Also, bacteria don't survive as well on dry stuff (individual pills). This is why vitamins and expired antibiotic pills are "generally" ok, compared to liquid stuff. That said, any discolouration or weirdness= don't eat!
Sorry, not ELI5, but basically liquid= bad bacteria growing after a certain time, but solid pills= no good house for bacteria to grow as quickly. If pills/tablets look weird, don't take them. Buy new ones.
Depends on the bacteria. Antibiotics have certain spectrums they can target. You can't guarantee past a certain point that the medicine is safe for ANY bacterial contamination. You're not betting on it being effective against the bacteria it does work on, but more the bacteria it doesn't work on, that might find its way in there.
Besides bacteria, there is also fungi (mold) in the air around us all the time. Antibiotics are not effective against mold
Hell, some mold MAKE antibiotics
I work in medical devices, and our parts require expiration dates per the FDA. We do validation tests on parts that have been sitting on a warehouse shelf for up to three years. The test data we have shows that the parts we built will pass all the same tests at 3 years as they do right when they are built. Obviously we wouldn't use expired parts, but I have a feeling they would last for quite a while past three years, we just don't have the data to prove it.
I would assume the same sort of requirements are in place for drugs. The expiration date is just the point at which the manufacturer tested the drugs for efficiency. Perhaps some drug manufacturers don't want to extend their expiration dates so people throw them away and purchase new ones.
IIRC, the FDA requires that they test effectiveness for at least a year. So anything that has a shorter expiration date than a year really will lose effectiveness/go bad/explode in that time. But if the expiration is at least a year, it's probably good for much longer.
I wish there were a website that would list the ones that really do have hard expiration dates. For example toothpaste loses effectiveness pretty hard after its expiration date. I'm sure there are others but I have no idea which. Mostly I just hate throwing stuff out.
Sunscreen can lose effectiveness quite dramatically as well. I had a buddy who turned into a boiled lobster after diligently applying expired sunscreen all day!
Great idea. Opens the door for all sorts of litigation with anecdotal cases from both sides (it worked too good, it didn't work at *all*)
Granted I'm from the US and the LAST fucking thing we need is *more* money and effort tied up in the ass-backwards healthcare industry we are working with. It's perfectly fine to leave it with an (arguable) expiration date. It's up to you whether you OD on expired Tylenol or buy a "fresh" bottle.
It wouldn’t work because everyone’s liver metabolizes different drugs at different rates, and that’s assuming they don’t have other issues like kidney disease.
Do it anonymously online. They're not suing pirate bay (well, they are/did, but somehow it survives).
I don't understand how you think throwing out medications that are still good but technically expired is going to make healthcare *more* expensive, seems like knowing which you can keep and which you can't is a good money saving technique for the average consumer.
>penicillin or the RNA vaccine for COVID 19
These are not living things that eventually die, though. Biological molecules (proteins, nucleic acids...) are still *just molecules*, but tend to be very big and complicated while needing to be mostly undamaged to work. Penicillin is not a great example in this regard because [it's pretty small](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Benzylpenicillin.svg/1920px-Benzylpenicillin.svg.png), maybe two dozen atoms. That's on a completely different scale from a multi-subunit protein like [an antibody](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HEPEFX/model-of-a-full-sized-antibody-igg-bound-to-two-molecules-of-the-designed-HEPEFX.jpg) (pic is not great, but the best I could find with a close up shot like this where you can visualize the individual carbons).
Long story short, freezing these drugs doesn't make them hibernate or anything. All chemical reactions just slow way down at lower temperatures.
Of course, live (attenuated) vaccines and other living treatments like blood products containing cells do exist.
I’ve heard too that the FDA requires them to put an expiration date no further out than two years IIRC. If the manufacturer wants to put anything further out than that, they have to prove the drug is stable long term. That costs money and so most manufacturers just put the required date despite the fact that the vast majority of drugs are potent for much longer.
Yes. From a neutraceutical standpoint, fish oil can go bad after the expiration date. Probiotics definitely can go bad very quickly. Probiotics are not meant to be stored at room temperature as they degrade very quickly and become useless as early as 3 to 6 months after packaging if left out at RT.
None of these become harmful/dangerous after expiration though. Except I guess oxidized fish oil isn’t good for you long term but it’s certainly not acutely dangerous either.
Once they’ve passed the date, the manufacturer no longer guarantees they’ll work as advertised.
Now obviously they’re not fine on March 31st and totally useless on April 1st, but they do chemically degrade over time and may eventually transform into some useless powder or sludge or a mystery chemical.
The exact process of chemical breakdown, how long it takes, and how hazardous or inert the resulting products will be varies considerably between medications. Some are small molecules theoretically stable for decades, others are complicated structures that break down rapidly.
This only means they have not done testing past this timeframe. Stability teams test different variables such as light and temp change on the compounds, and then they test these in incremental times. They are not tested past a certain point and therefore that is the cutoff date of GUARANTEE, or Conformance. Also past this time the compounds degrade and might have a lower efficacy than when "fresh"
I work in QC
Overtime, various chemical effects will change the chemicals in medications into other chemicals, which may have various effects: changing flavor, making the medication ineffective, making the medication stronger, or even making the medication toxic.
There are a number of causes of these, a few of the most common are:
- Oxygen in the air doesn’t like to remain free oxygen, and may combine with other chemicals. As a side note, this is why fat goes rancid.
- UV light, especially from the sun, tends to cause chemicals to break apart.
- Heat will cause chemicals to break apart or combine in a large number of ways.
- Cold will cause chemicals to change form, such as freezing, which can cause various damage.
- Moisture in the air will tend to absorb into chemicals, changing their behavior.
- Microbes might start to grow in or on the medication, which is more likely for wet medicines.
The expiration date is the time window the manufacturer is willing to guarantee these effects remain minimal. The FDA requires companies provide *some* timeline for safety reasons.
That said, the US government also keeps a [drug stockpile](https://aspr.hhs.gov/SNS/Pages/Sustaining-the-Stockpile.aspx), and regularly tests medications in it for safety and effectiveness. It is very common for drugs to remain good for years after their official expiration date, and some even for decades.
Naturally, that stockpile is kept under ideal conditions, and typical home storage may not get the same results. When the stockpile shows medications remain good much longer than their expiration date, the FDA will also do additional review to see if that holds under more normal storage, and may tell manufacturers to increase the expiration period.
I’ve been in the business for years and can answer this from a supply chain perspective.
Most manufacturers have a program that allows pharmacies to “trade-in” the expired drugs in exchange for credit to buy newer drugs.
The pharmacies pack and ship their drugs to a reverse logistics provider ( almost always Inmar or PharmaLogistics). Inmar will count/verify the drugs and send it to a separate company for destruction. The DEA wants everyone involved to maintain a proper chain of custody for controlled substances. Each party in the chain returns a DEA 222 form to verify that drugs were properly received.
Inmar/PL also works as the aggregator between manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies to determine how much money is owed.
Companies are required to perform stability testing as part of the registration process and on an ongoing basis for their production runs. From their point of view it just doesn't make sense to test things for long periods of time as there's no financial incentive to do so. So, in effect, when they put a shelf life on a drug they're saying that that's as far as we've tested it's stability so there's no guarantee beyond that time point. It's important to note that the shelf life also assumes certain storage conditions. i.e. a sealed container sitting at or near room temperature. Stuff stored open or in humid/hot conditions or stored in sunlight may not have the same shelf life.
As for what happens to drugs to cause degradation it can be any number of things. It may chemically break down into smaller molecules via oxidation, hydrolysis, UV light exposure, etc... or it can combine with excipients (the non active ingredient portion of the medicine) to form a new molecule. Either route can create substances which are more potent, less potent, or even non-active for it's intended purpose. Companies are also required to evaluate these break down products within the shelf life period to make sure that nothing unsafe is generated. Some drugs may also be perfectly stable under reasonable storage conditions and be good for their intended purpose indefinitely. It all depends on the drug chemistry, what excipients are used and how it's stored.
> A doctor that I know told me that the expiration dates mean nothing and that they are just Big Pharma's way to insert some planned obsolescence into their products.
Your doctor friend should have his medical license revoked for spreading conspiracy bullshit.
> Is this true? If not, what actually happens to the medications after their expiration dates?
No it’s most definitely not. For most medications the answer is that the medication is simply not tested beyond that length of date. Therefore the manufacture can make no claim as to its effectiveness. Generally, especially for over the counter drugs they just become less effective over time, though not necessarily by the end date. However for drugs where precise dosage is important such as insulin or antibiotics lowered potency can be deadly. Finally in rare cases the drug can break down into something toxic. But planned obsolescence? No, not remotely.
It depends on the medication usually it just starts losing some of its effectiveness but nothing too serious, that being said my mom once took some expired pills and got all dizzy and nauseated
Not necessarily anything. That's just how long they *are sure* it will last, because they have tested it and can guarantee it. Anything after that, they are officially saying "who knows?"
One of the most obvious instances of a medication expiring that I have encountered was a bottle of aspirin. The bottle was stored in a bag that got wet. When I opened the bottle later, it smelled strongly of vinegar (acetic acid) the main degradation product.
I've also seen old gel capsules have crystalline material years after they expire.
Depends on the medication. But a lot of common over the counter drugs just lose potency. Like old Nyquil will work for an hour or two as opposed to 6-8 hours of a fresh bottle.
Not much. They’re generally fine. The US military has a program (SLEP) to test how long medicines really last for due to the massive stockpiles they keep, and data from that shows most medicines last for many years past their shelf life. Those that don’t, don’t become dangerous, just a bit less effective.
There is no Big Pharma conspiracy, it’s just that’s as long as they’ve done testing on the medicine for to show it’s still safe and effective and can’t prove it’s ok any longer than that. Which is generally designed to be long enough to ship the medicine to where it needs to go and have it sit on a storage shelf for a while before it gets to the patient. There’s no incentive for them to test for longer, so they don’t.
There's a few comments here where people are talking about the drugs becoming less effective as they age and active ingredient breaks down, but that's only half the story.
The other half is that we have to consider what that active ingredient turns into as it degrades. A lot of really useful, even life-saving drugs, degrade into substances that are really quite unpleasant and if allowed to build up to high enough levels can have some very harmful effects. Levels of these degradation products and other impurities are thus tightly controlled and expiry dates are often set to account for a known increase in impurity content as a drug ages.
That said, you're not going to die from taking an expired aspirin. Probably.
Source: am pharmaceutical auditor, background in drug testing and development.
A few things could be happening by the time a medicine reaches its expiry:
1) loss of potency as the active ingredient degrades in some form or another (exact chemistries may vary)
2) inactive ingredients degrading (like filler material or the capsule) which may affect absorption rates.
3) not much at all, and, I'd guess for most it is strictly there as a compliance device and a way to shield from future liabilities.
Usually it merely means "it probably would still work but we didn't feel like spending decades testing that claim so legally we are restricted to only promising for the longest time we actually set the test for."
Basically drugs go through expiration tests that amount to actually waiting that long. They put the drug in the same kind of consumer packaging it would have when put into stores - airtight bottle, box, or whatever, and store it on a labeled shelf in some testing facility and then... just wait. Then they revisit it every so often and re-test the drug. So they do something like this "Well, we calculate that the drug would likely still be good for 10 maybe even 15 years, but proving it would mean waiting that many years before we can sell it. Screw that. Let's set up a test that just proves the first 2 years or so and then start selling it with the packaging printed to only say 2 years." You night notice that when a new pill is first on the market it has short expiration times printed on it. But as the product stays on the market longer and longer, the packaging goes through revisions that start printing longer expiration dates on it. That comes from the drug having been around long enough for longer-term test results to come in.
I saw a news article years ago about a family owned pharmacy that shut down and stayed sealed up for more than a decade, and when the family opened it back up, they donated all of the prescription and non-prescription meds to a local university. The science department tested the efficacy of all of the meds and something like 98% of them were still functional and usable as directed. It's mostly the ones that have weird storage requirements (low temps, no sunlight, etc.) that have issues, but as long as the proper storage conditions are maintained, they keep working, too.
They will slowly become less effective over time. The reason they have expiration dates is that the rate may not be constant or known for years after the date, so you can't just take one extra pill and expect the same results.
You got lots of good answers on what happens. In general, follow this rule:
If the pharmacy keep the medication on shelf, it usually means very little, as the degradation rate is very slow.
If the pharmacy have to get your meds from the fridge and you are told to keep the meds refrigerated, the expiry date is probably legit. Pharmacies won't keep meds cold unless they have to. Insulin is a good example of this.
Don't expose your meds to direct sunlight, as they WILL lose potency. This goes for more or less any medication.
Doc is probably right, with an exception of (a) antibiotics (b) eye drops and nasal sprays (c) all kinds of creams. Former lose effectiveness, latter two could turn into a Petri dish full of bacteria. There are stories of people losing their eyesight due to eye infection caused by infested eye drops.
I know that when I left my lexapro in my car as an emergency solution and tried to take them, that they didn’t work and I got a withdrawal headache. Heat seems to affect medication even more so than time.
I asked this same question to my cousin who's a pharmacologist. Her answer was essentially it truly means very little for the vast majority of medications. They do slowly degrade after a while as the active ingredients break down over time. However most medications don't go bad like food and won't harm you if you take them post expiration. They just won't be as effective. THAT is why the expiration date is there. It's the drug company saying "we no longer guarantee the effectiveness of this drug after this date."
Correct. Unless the medication is a children's antibiotic, an eye or ear medicine, it's unlikely that its effectiveness is compromised too much, but effectiveness will drop over time due to the active chemical in the medicine degrading. Nothing is meant to last forever. In terms of kids antibiotics, eye drops and ear drops, they're in liquid, which has higher risk of bacterial contamination once opened. Liquid antibiotics have a shelf life of 2 weeks, eye/ear drops for 30 days. We cannot guarantee there is no bacterial contamination after that time, as these medication formulas do not have safeguards for contamination. Pills/capsules last longer, as they're sealed in foil. Also, bacteria don't survive as well on dry stuff (individual pills). This is why vitamins and expired antibiotic pills are "generally" ok, compared to liquid stuff. That said, any discolouration or weirdness= don't eat! Sorry, not ELI5, but basically liquid= bad bacteria growing after a certain time, but solid pills= no good house for bacteria to grow as quickly. If pills/tablets look weird, don't take them. Buy new ones.
I would really think an antibiotic would last longer. Like it seems like it would just kill anything trying contaminate it.
Depends on the bacteria. Antibiotics have certain spectrums they can target. You can't guarantee past a certain point that the medicine is safe for ANY bacterial contamination. You're not betting on it being effective against the bacteria it does work on, but more the bacteria it doesn't work on, that might find its way in there.
Besides bacteria, there is also fungi (mold) in the air around us all the time. Antibiotics are not effective against mold Hell, some mold MAKE antibiotics
I work in medical devices, and our parts require expiration dates per the FDA. We do validation tests on parts that have been sitting on a warehouse shelf for up to three years. The test data we have shows that the parts we built will pass all the same tests at 3 years as they do right when they are built. Obviously we wouldn't use expired parts, but I have a feeling they would last for quite a while past three years, we just don't have the data to prove it. I would assume the same sort of requirements are in place for drugs. The expiration date is just the point at which the manufacturer tested the drugs for efficiency. Perhaps some drug manufacturers don't want to extend their expiration dates so people throw them away and purchase new ones.
Probably should have read the other comments saying the same thing I just did before I posted. Oh well. lol
IIRC, the FDA requires that they test effectiveness for at least a year. So anything that has a shorter expiration date than a year really will lose effectiveness/go bad/explode in that time. But if the expiration is at least a year, it's probably good for much longer.
I wish there were a website that would list the ones that really do have hard expiration dates. For example toothpaste loses effectiveness pretty hard after its expiration date. I'm sure there are others but I have no idea which. Mostly I just hate throwing stuff out.
Sunscreen can lose effectiveness quite dramatically as well. I had a buddy who turned into a boiled lobster after diligently applying expired sunscreen all day!
I respect any liquid's expiration date, it's solids I wonder about.
Great idea. Opens the door for all sorts of litigation with anecdotal cases from both sides (it worked too good, it didn't work at *all*) Granted I'm from the US and the LAST fucking thing we need is *more* money and effort tied up in the ass-backwards healthcare industry we are working with. It's perfectly fine to leave it with an (arguable) expiration date. It's up to you whether you OD on expired Tylenol or buy a "fresh" bottle.
It wouldn’t work because everyone’s liver metabolizes different drugs at different rates, and that’s assuming they don’t have other issues like kidney disease.
Do it anonymously online. They're not suing pirate bay (well, they are/did, but somehow it survives). I don't understand how you think throwing out medications that are still good but technically expired is going to make healthcare *more* expensive, seems like knowing which you can keep and which you can't is a good money saving technique for the average consumer.
I can throw most stuff out but I have some little blue ones I’m hesitant to get rid of. I wonder if they’re on the useless list now.
[удалено]
>penicillin or the RNA vaccine for COVID 19 These are not living things that eventually die, though. Biological molecules (proteins, nucleic acids...) are still *just molecules*, but tend to be very big and complicated while needing to be mostly undamaged to work. Penicillin is not a great example in this regard because [it's pretty small](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Benzylpenicillin.svg/1920px-Benzylpenicillin.svg.png), maybe two dozen atoms. That's on a completely different scale from a multi-subunit protein like [an antibody](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HEPEFX/model-of-a-full-sized-antibody-igg-bound-to-two-molecules-of-the-designed-HEPEFX.jpg) (pic is not great, but the best I could find with a close up shot like this where you can visualize the individual carbons). Long story short, freezing these drugs doesn't make them hibernate or anything. All chemical reactions just slow way down at lower temperatures. Of course, live (attenuated) vaccines and other living treatments like blood products containing cells do exist.
/u/copnonymous why delete your comment entirely?
I’ve heard too that the FDA requires them to put an expiration date no further out than two years IIRC. If the manufacturer wants to put anything further out than that, they have to prove the drug is stable long term. That costs money and so most manufacturers just put the required date despite the fact that the vast majority of drugs are potent for much longer.
Are there any drugs or medications that become dangerous to use after their expiration date?
Tetracycline (an antibiotic) becomes toxic and can cause kidney damage. Not sure about its relatives but I wouldn't chance it.
Yes. From a neutraceutical standpoint, fish oil can go bad after the expiration date. Probiotics definitely can go bad very quickly. Probiotics are not meant to be stored at room temperature as they degrade very quickly and become useless as early as 3 to 6 months after packaging if left out at RT.
None of these become harmful/dangerous after expiration though. Except I guess oxidized fish oil isn’t good for you long term but it’s certainly not acutely dangerous either.
It can degrade into peroxides. Not enough to kill you, but not good, either. Yuck
Once they’ve passed the date, the manufacturer no longer guarantees they’ll work as advertised. Now obviously they’re not fine on March 31st and totally useless on April 1st, but they do chemically degrade over time and may eventually transform into some useless powder or sludge or a mystery chemical. The exact process of chemical breakdown, how long it takes, and how hazardous or inert the resulting products will be varies considerably between medications. Some are small molecules theoretically stable for decades, others are complicated structures that break down rapidly.
This only means they have not done testing past this timeframe. Stability teams test different variables such as light and temp change on the compounds, and then they test these in incremental times. They are not tested past a certain point and therefore that is the cutoff date of GUARANTEE, or Conformance. Also past this time the compounds degrade and might have a lower efficacy than when "fresh" I work in QC
Overtime, various chemical effects will change the chemicals in medications into other chemicals, which may have various effects: changing flavor, making the medication ineffective, making the medication stronger, or even making the medication toxic. There are a number of causes of these, a few of the most common are: - Oxygen in the air doesn’t like to remain free oxygen, and may combine with other chemicals. As a side note, this is why fat goes rancid. - UV light, especially from the sun, tends to cause chemicals to break apart. - Heat will cause chemicals to break apart or combine in a large number of ways. - Cold will cause chemicals to change form, such as freezing, which can cause various damage. - Moisture in the air will tend to absorb into chemicals, changing their behavior. - Microbes might start to grow in or on the medication, which is more likely for wet medicines. The expiration date is the time window the manufacturer is willing to guarantee these effects remain minimal. The FDA requires companies provide *some* timeline for safety reasons. That said, the US government also keeps a [drug stockpile](https://aspr.hhs.gov/SNS/Pages/Sustaining-the-Stockpile.aspx), and regularly tests medications in it for safety and effectiveness. It is very common for drugs to remain good for years after their official expiration date, and some even for decades. Naturally, that stockpile is kept under ideal conditions, and typical home storage may not get the same results. When the stockpile shows medications remain good much longer than their expiration date, the FDA will also do additional review to see if that holds under more normal storage, and may tell manufacturers to increase the expiration period.
I’ve been in the business for years and can answer this from a supply chain perspective. Most manufacturers have a program that allows pharmacies to “trade-in” the expired drugs in exchange for credit to buy newer drugs. The pharmacies pack and ship their drugs to a reverse logistics provider ( almost always Inmar or PharmaLogistics). Inmar will count/verify the drugs and send it to a separate company for destruction. The DEA wants everyone involved to maintain a proper chain of custody for controlled substances. Each party in the chain returns a DEA 222 form to verify that drugs were properly received. Inmar/PL also works as the aggregator between manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies to determine how much money is owed.
Companies are required to perform stability testing as part of the registration process and on an ongoing basis for their production runs. From their point of view it just doesn't make sense to test things for long periods of time as there's no financial incentive to do so. So, in effect, when they put a shelf life on a drug they're saying that that's as far as we've tested it's stability so there's no guarantee beyond that time point. It's important to note that the shelf life also assumes certain storage conditions. i.e. a sealed container sitting at or near room temperature. Stuff stored open or in humid/hot conditions or stored in sunlight may not have the same shelf life. As for what happens to drugs to cause degradation it can be any number of things. It may chemically break down into smaller molecules via oxidation, hydrolysis, UV light exposure, etc... or it can combine with excipients (the non active ingredient portion of the medicine) to form a new molecule. Either route can create substances which are more potent, less potent, or even non-active for it's intended purpose. Companies are also required to evaluate these break down products within the shelf life period to make sure that nothing unsafe is generated. Some drugs may also be perfectly stable under reasonable storage conditions and be good for their intended purpose indefinitely. It all depends on the drug chemistry, what excipients are used and how it's stored.
> A doctor that I know told me that the expiration dates mean nothing and that they are just Big Pharma's way to insert some planned obsolescence into their products. Your doctor friend should have his medical license revoked for spreading conspiracy bullshit. > Is this true? If not, what actually happens to the medications after their expiration dates? No it’s most definitely not. For most medications the answer is that the medication is simply not tested beyond that length of date. Therefore the manufacture can make no claim as to its effectiveness. Generally, especially for over the counter drugs they just become less effective over time, though not necessarily by the end date. However for drugs where precise dosage is important such as insulin or antibiotics lowered potency can be deadly. Finally in rare cases the drug can break down into something toxic. But planned obsolescence? No, not remotely.
It depends on the medication usually it just starts losing some of its effectiveness but nothing too serious, that being said my mom once took some expired pills and got all dizzy and nauseated
Not necessarily anything. That's just how long they *are sure* it will last, because they have tested it and can guarantee it. Anything after that, they are officially saying "who knows?"
One of the most obvious instances of a medication expiring that I have encountered was a bottle of aspirin. The bottle was stored in a bag that got wet. When I opened the bottle later, it smelled strongly of vinegar (acetic acid) the main degradation product. I've also seen old gel capsules have crystalline material years after they expire.
Depends on the medication. But a lot of common over the counter drugs just lose potency. Like old Nyquil will work for an hour or two as opposed to 6-8 hours of a fresh bottle.
Not much. They’re generally fine. The US military has a program (SLEP) to test how long medicines really last for due to the massive stockpiles they keep, and data from that shows most medicines last for many years past their shelf life. Those that don’t, don’t become dangerous, just a bit less effective. There is no Big Pharma conspiracy, it’s just that’s as long as they’ve done testing on the medicine for to show it’s still safe and effective and can’t prove it’s ok any longer than that. Which is generally designed to be long enough to ship the medicine to where it needs to go and have it sit on a storage shelf for a while before it gets to the patient. There’s no incentive for them to test for longer, so they don’t.
There's a few comments here where people are talking about the drugs becoming less effective as they age and active ingredient breaks down, but that's only half the story. The other half is that we have to consider what that active ingredient turns into as it degrades. A lot of really useful, even life-saving drugs, degrade into substances that are really quite unpleasant and if allowed to build up to high enough levels can have some very harmful effects. Levels of these degradation products and other impurities are thus tightly controlled and expiry dates are often set to account for a known increase in impurity content as a drug ages. That said, you're not going to die from taking an expired aspirin. Probably. Source: am pharmaceutical auditor, background in drug testing and development.
Can u list 5 drugs that turn toxic as they get too old?
A few things could be happening by the time a medicine reaches its expiry: 1) loss of potency as the active ingredient degrades in some form or another (exact chemistries may vary) 2) inactive ingredients degrading (like filler material or the capsule) which may affect absorption rates. 3) not much at all, and, I'd guess for most it is strictly there as a compliance device and a way to shield from future liabilities.
Usually it merely means "it probably would still work but we didn't feel like spending decades testing that claim so legally we are restricted to only promising for the longest time we actually set the test for." Basically drugs go through expiration tests that amount to actually waiting that long. They put the drug in the same kind of consumer packaging it would have when put into stores - airtight bottle, box, or whatever, and store it on a labeled shelf in some testing facility and then... just wait. Then they revisit it every so often and re-test the drug. So they do something like this "Well, we calculate that the drug would likely still be good for 10 maybe even 15 years, but proving it would mean waiting that many years before we can sell it. Screw that. Let's set up a test that just proves the first 2 years or so and then start selling it with the packaging printed to only say 2 years." You night notice that when a new pill is first on the market it has short expiration times printed on it. But as the product stays on the market longer and longer, the packaging goes through revisions that start printing longer expiration dates on it. That comes from the drug having been around long enough for longer-term test results to come in.
I saw a news article years ago about a family owned pharmacy that shut down and stayed sealed up for more than a decade, and when the family opened it back up, they donated all of the prescription and non-prescription meds to a local university. The science department tested the efficacy of all of the meds and something like 98% of them were still functional and usable as directed. It's mostly the ones that have weird storage requirements (low temps, no sunlight, etc.) that have issues, but as long as the proper storage conditions are maintained, they keep working, too.
How medications have been stored in home ? clean dry room temperature low humidity in area free from others tampering with them safest
They will slowly become less effective over time. The reason they have expiration dates is that the rate may not be constant or known for years after the date, so you can't just take one extra pill and expect the same results.
I think no company wants infinite liability for their products.. When my Mom died we found 40 year old prescription and OTC in her bathroom.
You got lots of good answers on what happens. In general, follow this rule: If the pharmacy keep the medication on shelf, it usually means very little, as the degradation rate is very slow. If the pharmacy have to get your meds from the fridge and you are told to keep the meds refrigerated, the expiry date is probably legit. Pharmacies won't keep meds cold unless they have to. Insulin is a good example of this. Don't expose your meds to direct sunlight, as they WILL lose potency. This goes for more or less any medication.
Doc is probably right, with an exception of (a) antibiotics (b) eye drops and nasal sprays (c) all kinds of creams. Former lose effectiveness, latter two could turn into a Petri dish full of bacteria. There are stories of people losing their eyesight due to eye infection caused by infested eye drops.
I know that when I left my lexapro in my car as an emergency solution and tried to take them, that they didn’t work and I got a withdrawal headache. Heat seems to affect medication even more so than time.