You know the nitroglycerin tablets, that people with angina take. Now I have a health heart (so far as I know) what happens, if I were to put one of those tablets under my tongue.
I am not planning to do this, and I don’t have access to them, I was just wondering. Would it make my heart beat faster, I believe it’s a vasodilator right?
You get a roaring headache.
Also, your blood pressure may drop enough to make you faint upon standing. Other than that, I don’t think it would cause any serious problems.
When I was getting my cardiac problems sorted out, I was on isosorbide dinitrate, and the way I knew it was working is I had a constant headache.
It would probably make you dizzy and give you a headache. It could make you pass out if your blood pressure drops fast enough. It would lower your heart rate.
In the animal ER, we apply a paste to patients’ “armpits” and have to be very careful, using gloves and/or a tongue depressor to apply the nitro paste, or we risk side effects from it absorbing through the skin of a finger.
What is the headache due to?
Vasodilation. Nitroglycerine makes your blood vessels dilate, which is associated with headache, while vasoconstriction is associated with stopping headache. This is why a number of headache medications (ergot alkaloids, the various triptans, caffeine, etc) are vasoconstrictors. This is also why anything that’s a potent vasodilator can give you a roaring headache - one of the more reliable ways of getting an instant headache is a histamine injection.
When I was a revenue mgr on of my staff took them, till she got her angioplasty.
So everyone gets headaches? Even the cardiac patients? I guess it’s better than dying 
You explode. Or a roaring headache. One or the other.
Does the pill explode if you drop it?
Or hit with a hammer? I’m serious.
I think, to get a real explosion out of nitro, you need to have a fair bit of it, probably more than is in a medical dose.
I had a high school friend who once told me that he had synthesized a small amount of nitroglycerin in his home chemistry lab. He had it in a test tube which he flung down hard, in the street, to try and make it explode. However, he told me that in fact it just “hissed a bit”.
Admittedly it is quite possible that he was putting me on, but I should think that if he was lying he would have given the story a more spectacular ending, and certainly my group of friends were not averse to making small amounts of unstable explosive compounds. I and other friends would quite often make nitrogen tri-iodide (very easy: just pour some ammonium hydroxide over some iodine crystals, and then let it dry) which would give satisfyingly loud cracking noises if hit with something. Maybe you could get medical nitro to do that.
(Of course, if my friend really did try to make nitroglycerin, it is more than likely that his synthesis was not very good, and that his test tube in fact contained little or none of the actual stuff. It occurs to me that the hiss might just have been something on the road interacting with the nitric acid he used.)
pretty much everyone gets the headache. Many nurses automatically bring the prn Tylenol along with the nitro. Nitropaste doesn’t seem to have such a dramatic effect.
Which is asprin? It stops headaches, yet helps the heart.
Asprin is a mild anti-coagulator, so it helps prevent blood clots. It’s also an anti-inflammatory, so it may tend to prevent irritation in the linings of arteries, which might reduce plaque buildup. I don’t believe it has any significant blood vessel dilation effects.
It has a whole bunch of effects. It prevents the formation of vasoconstrictive factors (like thromboxanes), but it also prevents the formation of vasodilatory factors (like prostacyclins). There’s some cross-talk with other pathways like bradykinins. Overall, many of those effects are a wash, and its main effects are analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-platelet aggregation - which is what it’s prescribed for. The trick is that the enzyme that aspirin inhibits is found in multiple places in the body, but most of those places can make more of it after aspirin knocks it out; the places that can’t regenerate the enzyme (i.e., platelets) largely determine the overall effect.
Interestingly, because similar factors also have an effect on bronchoconstriction/dilation, there are some variants of asthma that are sensitive to aspirin - in those cases, taking aspirin will prevent the formation of bronchodilatory factors, causing an asthma attack. It’s not common, though.
I didn’t know nitroglycerin was still used. I thought it was a medication of the past (say, till the 50s or so)
Yeah, the not very bright husband of my ex-BF’s cousin did this once maybe 10 years ago at a big family dinner; got indigestion, decided he was having a heart attack although he’s never had any heart issues, and took someone else’s nitro tablet. That’s when he ended up in the ER.
Did I mention he wasn’t very bright?
Pardon my nitpickiness, but all other things being equal, anything that drops your blood pressure will lead to a compensatory increase in heart rate.
I’m wondering if the reason you said that NTG lowers the heart rate is because that could explain its anti-angina effect. Although slowing the heart rate is part of the mechanism for beta-blockers’ anti-angina effect, it doesn’t apply to NTG.
NTG prevents/relieves angina by both dilating arteries in the heart itself (thereby bringing more oxygen to the heart) and by causing blood to pool in the veins of the body. Such pooling means that there will be less blood delivered back to the heart which means, in turn, that the heart muscle isn’t strained as much (and thus can get by with less oxygen than when not experiencing that NTG effect).
If you are Italian American its a very badddd thing.
Take one and its bada bing bada boom!
No, it’s still very widely used for treatment of angina - it’s fast, it can absorb through the oral mucous membrane under the tongue, and it does the job. It’s still around because it works and works very well. As mentioned, it comes in a number of formulations - the classic small tablets, a paste/ointment form, a spray meant for spraying under the tongue, and a skin patch that can be work for several hours.
As a nurse, I’ve gotten nitropaste on my hands more than once. The headache is classic, but it passes pretty quickly. Never got enough on me to feel fainty, though.
Wow, that takes me back. I was a chemistry freak, and had a pretty good lab even before I took Chemistry in HS. I loved to make nitro tri-iodide, pouring it on a piece of filter paper to dry. Made a nice loud noise when hit, alright.
I made nitroglycerin too, but can’t remember exactly how. I think it was just nitric acid and glycerin with sulfuric acid as a desiccant. I made a tube of it, but was too chicken to try to detonate it, so poured it out into the dirt out back. All this was about 70 years ago. I am a bit wiser now.