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Declared and Measured Amounts in Drugs. View Large Download. Title 21 CFR Current good manufacturing practice in manufacturing for finished pharmaceuticals and expiration dating Sandford-Smith J. Outdated drugs may be useful.
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Accessed January 18, Save Preferences. That might be acceptable if it weren't for the pharmacist who may reduce the expiration to one year from when the prescription is written! Some states require pharmacists to do this. This came from a recommendation from the U. Pharmacopeia, a not-for-profit group that establishes standards for drug makers.
The logic is that when a drug is taken out of its original container and put in a pharmacy canister, moisture and air can degrade the pills or capsules.
In addition, a patient's condition may change, new drugs may become available so that the old drug is no longer the best option , or new information may become available such as potential interactions with other drugs.
So, limiting the prescription to a year from when it's originally filled adds an extra level of safety, requiring the doctor to review whether continuing with the old medication beyond one year is still a good idea. Even with the best of intentions, this conservative standard makes it even more likely that enormous amounts of perfectly good medications will be thrown away in this country each year. We may not save that much. And we don't have the FDA to test and oversee extensions on our medicines' expiration dates.
But there is a fair amount of evidence that medications stored properly, appear intact and are not one of the exceptions mentioned above, are likely to be safe to take.
For many common conditions, such as allergies, headaches or back pain, I'm willing to take the risk of applying my own, modest extension to the expiration date.
It's too bad that the mystery leftovers in the fridge don't come with an expiration date. The results of the analysis were published online on October 8, , in Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers worked with samples of 8 medications that had expired 28 to 40 years earlier and contained 15 different active ingredients in all.
The researchers analyzed 3 tablets or capsules of each medication, and each sample was tested 3 times for each labeled active ingredient. One active ingredient, homatropine, was not tested for as no analytical standard could be found for it.
The active ingredients tested for were: aspirin, amphetamine, phenacetin, methaqualone, codeine, butalbital, caffeine, phenobarbital, meprobamate, pentobarbital, secobarbital, hydrocodone, chlorpheniramine, and acetaminophen.
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