10 or so years ago, I banged up my foot. Went to the doc, and it turned out nothing broken, but but it was swollen and had some pretty colors for a week or so. Doc wrote me a prescription for a ‘pain killer.’
But not any of the good stuff that constipates you. Nope. Just a big industrial sized Ibuprofen (I think 600 mg). I get the occasional headache now and then, but for my purposes, the 200 mg Ibuprofen work just find, so I didn’t really have much use for the big stuff, so it just sat there in my medicine cabinet.
And sat. And sat.
So. . . does Ibuprofen go bad or lose efficacy over time? Could the binders possibly go bad? I’ll probably just throw the stuff out, but was just curious.
Throw it out. Whether it loses its potency or not, its never a great idea to use 10-year old meds. Our local law enforcement agency has a place to drop off out of date pills. Don’t just flush them down the toilet like most people do.
Hmm… I have a recollection of a study by the US military that tested shelf life of common drugs way past the typical sorts of expiration dates. Most drugs were perfectly fine, even many years after the listed expiration date.
However I can’t find any details about the results of specific medications. That may never have been made publicly available. Best cite I’ve found for that, so far, is the first mention of this study by the Wall Street Journal.
They are probably fine, especially since ibuprofen is not a drug that is life-sustaining (i.e. who cares if it loses a bit of its efficacy?).
Here’s another article that talks about drug expiration dates.
From the article:
Some of the exceptions to this are nitroglycerin, insulin, and liquid antibiotics. That said, these drugs fall into the category of “life-sustaining” drugs, so I personally wouldn’t take any chances with the expiration date of these anyway.
I agree completely on NOT flushing unwanted drugs down the toilet. They inevitably end up dispersed into the environment and drinking water, and not all drugs break down quickly. For an uncontrolled drug with no abuse potential, though, it’s probably fine to simply dispose of it in the trash, where it will either be incinerated or end up in a lined landfill.
It would be cynical, yeah. I had a similar question not that long ago about out-of-date ibuprofen (though not ten years!) Rather than asking the question, I just used them as if they weren’t expired, and they seemed to work just fine.
Ibuprofen breaks down into something called 4-isobutylacetophenone, aka 4-IBAP. It’s considered toxic, but I can’t easily find out exactly how it’s bad.
Some people at the College of Charleston were studying old ibuprofen a few years ago. Their blog just drops off without giving us the goods, but they did publish an article, but I don’t have access to it.
The blog does touch on the relation between storage temperature and usable shelf life and something called the Arrhenius equation:
*k = Ae^(-Ea/RT)
But, let’s skip the math and get straight to the answer: If a medicine has 36 months of shelf life at 20-25 C, it has 30-40 days of shelf life at 70C. Roughly, you can half the shelf life for every additional 10 degrees Celsius.
Remember, these are rough estimates, but you can see:
20C: 1080 days
30C: 540 days
40C: 270 days
50C: 135 days
60C: 68 days
70C: 34 days*
It’s bad practice to use expired medications in the general sense. I don’t see much cost effectiveness since you can buy fresh OTC for $7. I’d stick to the 400 mg dosage every six hours and see if that does what it wants to do to you.
Maybe this one time you’ll be okay, but you give yourself permission to bend the rules. You’ll wind up bending more rules and more rules until something breaks … that inevitably will lead to a negative outcome.
I know that clinical trial drugs regularly “go out of date” and are returned to the manufacturer only to be repackaged with a new use by date. Clinical trial drugs have a shortened use by date to keep stocks down at trial sites, making drug accountability easier and to prevent “subject drug loss” (read as - trial patients selling the drugs and claiming they lost them)
Naw. Just plane ol’ Ibuprofen. No disguised medication or friends involved.
As I mentioned earlier, 600 mg is just a bit overkill for my purposes. As noted in another thread, if I (or anyone) wanted 600 mg of Ibuprofen, I could just take 3 or 4 of the 200s that I keep in stock. [Sorry, went to public school in central South Carolina, so I’m not exactly sure how the math works out.)
We don’t really know. They certainly won’t be completely removed by standard sewage treatment, so they’ll end up in a nearby river, which could even be a drinking water source for other humans.
We almost certainly don’t have much clue about what the drugs will break down into, particularly in the chain of sewage-treatment plant-river/ocean. So we don’t really know how much or what effect they’ll have. But we do know that the original compounds are drugs, so they start out having a big effect on humans at relatively small concentrations. Probably better not to chance it if possible.
I’ve looked into this kind of thing before myself, and actually have some 800mg Ibuprofen tablets that are a little less than half as old as the OP’s. I admit to having used them recently, and suffered no ill effect, other than an odd aftertaste that may or may not have existed when it was fresh.
When looking up older threads and articles on the subject, the answers were pretty much the same as in this thread: a few stern warnings to NEVER use ANY expired medication, mixed with others saying they’re probably OK (including pharmacy employees who said they would regularly keep and use meds that had expired before they could be sold).
That said, I found nothing really specific on expired Ibuprofen. Best I could find (and can’t remember the exact place, so sorry no cite) is expired Ibuprofen has “decreased efficacy”. So, in all likelihood, it will just be weaker than it would have been when you should have been using it. I wish I could have found something to the effect of “50% loss of potency after 10 years”, but it seems to be easier to just tell people to just get rid of it and buy new stuff.