Since 1979, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required drug companies to set expiration dates for prescription and over-the-counter drugs. This does not mean that the ibuprofen blister is damaged in the same way as, for example, a carton of expired milk.
The date you see printed on the pill boxes or jars is the date until which the drug manufacturer guarantees its safety and full potency. However, how long a drug is safe and effective is often up for discussion.
In addition to some medications such as insulin, nitroglycerin, and liquid antibiotics, whose active ingredients are known to be poorly stable over time, many medications can have a much longer shelf life than their packaging suggests.
But not everyone knows it, so there are people who go to the emergency room scared because they accidentally took an expired medicine.
While it is true that poisonings from taking expired drugs are extremely rare, their effectiveness, however, can degrade over time, but there are few studies on the subject.
In a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine in 2012, researchers found a shipment of old drugs and, some of them at least 40 years after their date of manufacture, still retained all their properties.
According to the authors of this study, pharmaceutical companies are the only ones who have the money to do long-term studies on the effectiveness of drugs, “but they have absolutely no financial incentive to do so.”
A 2006 SLEP study tested 122 different drugs stored under ideal conditions , and as a result, extended the expiration date of most drugs in stock by an average of about four years.
The US government, however, has a financial incentive to study the shelf life of drugs. The United States maintains a stockpile of drugs that might be needed in an emergency, such as a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak. In 1986, the FDA and the US Department of Defense initiated the Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP) to save on replacement costs for expired drugs in this reserve.
In Spain
Remember that in our country you can also clean the medicine cabinet properly. In all pharmacies there are SIGRE containers ( Integrated System of Management and Collection of Containers ) where we can carry all those medicines that we are no longer going to use or that are out of date. You should not throw them away.
Risk
What about drugs that do lose their effectiveness? The truth is that it is very difficult to be completely sure that an expired drug will be effective when you really need it. So the best is prevention, because there is no security:
” Many drugs can be used past the expiration date, but this additional period of stability is highly variable,” the authors state.
What medicines you should not take under any circumstances if they are expired
C olyria, epinephrine, anticonvulsants and antiepileptics, warfarin, paraldehyde, oral contraceptives, digoxin, thyroid preparations, or insulin.
Citation: Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications Lee Cantrell, PharmD; Jeffrey R. Suchard, MD; Alan Wu, PhD; et al Roy R. Gerona, PhD Article Information Arch Intern Med. 2012; 172 (21): 1685-1687. doi: 10.1001 / archinternmed.2012.4501
