I am wondering something & have been for a long time. But everytime that i had asked someone the question that i have been wondering about, and the question is, " how can alcohol & tylenol kill someone? The person or people would say to me as follows: " don’t ask questions like that to anyone because you don’t have the right to have that question answered.
Here’s a column by Cecil: Does Tylenol + alcohol = liver failure? Plus: Is the CN Tower the tallest building? - The Straight Dope
Here are some more links that came up from a simple web search:
http://arthritis.emedtv.com/tylenol/tylenol-and-alcohol.html
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/22/is-it-safe-to-take-tylonel-after-drinking/
The active ingredient in Tylenol is paracetemol, which taken in sufficient quantity causes irreversible liver failure, which is fatal. It is a very, very unpleasant death, and takes between two and five days.
Taking paracemetol with alcohol doesn’t increase the toxicity. But there is some evidence that if you are regular heavy drinker, your resistance to paracetemol toxicity is lowered, so a lower dose will be fatal.
Side note to avoid chance of confusion - paracetemol is known as acetaminophen in the US.
For a more simplified version: they both are removed in the liver. Taking too much of either one can cause liver failure. But them together, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
At least, that’s what my uncle who is dying from alcohol-induced liver disease was told. He can’t have either.
While the answers given are quite correct, and probably what the OP is after, there’s another contrived scenario that would work. Aspirin is a blood thinner while alcohol is a vasodilator. Both of these work to lower blood pressure*, so in theory, you could get very drunk and take a lot of aspirin to lower your BP to lethal levels.
*Alcoholics have high blood pressure, true, but the immediate impact is lower BP.
But there isn’t any aspirin in tylenol, is there?
(Or, has “tylenol” become a generic word in the US for any non-prescription painkiller in tablet form, including aspirin?)
To clarify a bit, the potential toxicity of the combination of alcohol and tylenol (acetaminophen, paracetamol) depends on whether the person taking them is a daily (or habitual) user of alcohol or not. It also depends on whether the tylenol and alcohol are taken simultaneously or not.
The bottom lines, then, are
- if the alcohol is taken at the same time as the tylenol, the chance of toxicity is actually reduced.
- if the person uses alcohol on a daily, or near-daily, basis, the risk of toxicity from the co-ingestion of tylenol is increased.
To explain these statements, you need to understand, firstly, that toxicity due to tylenol is a result of (the accumulation) of one of its breakdown products, and not the tylenol itself. This toxic breakdown product is formed as the result of a particular enzyme working on the tylenol. As it turns out, this enzyme is one of the ones that’s involved in breaking down alcohol. Since our bodies have only a limited amount of this enzyme, if follows that if the enzyme is busy working on alcohol, there is less of it available to work on tylenol (and thus less available to generate the toxic breakdown product). In other words, drinking alcohol at the same time as taking tylenol should protect against tylenol toxicity.
The explanation for the second statement above is twofold: 1. habitual alcohol users tend to have limited supply of glutathione, the natural ‘antidote’ for tylenol. This makes them more susceptible to tylenol toxicity 2. daily alcohol users tend also to have increased levels (or ‘activity’) of the enzyme responsible for generating the toxic breakdown product of tylenol as described above (i.e. alcohol “induces” that enzyme, a not uncommon phenomenon in biology where an enzyme’s substrate is also its inducer). Again, the expected result is increased tylenol toxicity.
ETA:
You lost me here. First, tylenol is not aspirin. Second, aspirin does not work to lower blood pressure.
No, though it has arguably become the generic word for any non-aspirin pain-killing tablet.
No, I don’t think it has. Perhaps non-NSAID, but certainly not non-aspirin.
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I know. That’s why I called it a contrived scenario and said it’s not what the OP was looking for. I just thought it was a) related, and b) interesting.
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Then why is it prescribed for high blood pressure? Is it not a known blood thinner? Isn’t it advisable to take aspirin during a heart attack?
I mean, if you’ve got dilated blood vessels and thin blood, doesn’t that sound like a recipe for death?
A few misconceptions to clear up:
It inhibits platelet stickiness, it doesn’t “thin the blood”
It’s not automatically prescribed for hypertension (or shouldn’t be, anyway). It’s prescribed for people who fit certain risk categories for having coronary events. Hypertension may or may not be one of those risk categories, depending on the person’s entire health picture.
In properly selected folks, aspirin use reduces the risk of having a thrombotic heart attack more than it raises the risk of having a debilitating hemorrhage.
Aspirin is being recommended for fewer folks these days, based on the fact that for many folks, chronic use is a greater risk than a benefit.
Note to self; there is no reason to keep acetaminophen in the house. (My tummy handles aspirin just fine.
The viscousity of the blood is unaffected by aspirin. ‘Blood thinner’ is a widely, but innappropriately used term for for the desired effect of aspririn and coumadin to reduce the tendency of blood to clot.
Wow, that linked site is just chock of full of misinformation. It’s sites like that which underscore the maxim, ‘don’t believe everything you read on the Internet’.
As the good doc Qadgop said, although aspirin is sometimes used to treat people with high blood pressure, it’s not because aspirin lowers the pressure. Rather, aspirin may protect against things like heart attacks and strokes, which high blood pressure promotes. The “nature of your blood pressure” has nothing to do with whether it will be helped by aspirin if for no other reason than that aspirin has no effect on BP.
Where to start? Except in some rare diseases (which I’m certain the author doesn’t know about), blood viscosity has nothing to do with blood pressure. The reasons for high blood pressure are complex and even today not entirely clear. But, one thing is clear. Except for some very rare conditions, blood viscosity (a term almost never used by doctors, btw) is independent of blood pressure. The blood is not “thick” in high blood pressure. All that being said, I’m pretty sure that the author of that piece isn’t using viscosity in the usual sense of the word (for medicine). It looks to me that he/she is using viscosity as a synonym for 'tendency to clot". If so, that suggests that either he/she is talking down to his/her audience or doesn’t have a clue about the things they’re talking about. Regardless of definitions used, though, stating that, “(aspirin’s) capability to reduce the viscosity of blood is generally acknowledged” is indefensible. First, and again as Qad said, aspirin doesn’t affect blood viscosity. Second, whenever someone claims that their opinion or statement is “generally acknowledge”, beware. Especially when their statement/opinion is nonsense.
This makes no sense and really does confirm that the author doesn’t know what he/she is talking about. For starters, as a general rule and so long as the original reasons for its use still apply and that significant side effects haven’t supervened, aspirin should not be stopped. Stopping it simply permits the person’s previously diagnosed tendency to clot to then become unopposed. Assuming that the aspirin had been working to prevent heart attacks and strokes, stopping it means losing whatever protective effect the aspirin had been having. Remember, within days of stopping aspirin, it no longer has any (even residual) effect. There’s even some (admittedly weak) evidence to suggest that stopping aspirin may be associated with a rebound increase in the tendency of blood to clot. Or, phrased differently, as time goes on, people may become resistant to the effect of aspirin and actually require a larger dose to achieve the same effect. Bottom line is that not only does the blood not “thin down” with aspirin, “the doctor” is not going to “ask you to stop taking it.”
I understand that you are not a health professional (at least I think so). My attack here is obviously directed at the site you linked to and not against you. It just bugs me that someone was arrogant enough to put such crap out there for other people to see and to act on. It’s really unforgivable - either the author knew it was BS or, if he/she didn’t, then they shouldn’t be presuming to write medical advice columns for others. No, they should be double-checking with someone who does know what they’re talking about.