Will that expired medication still work?
As highlighted by The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics, an independent review on pharmaceutical drugs, while it’s always preferable to use medications prior to their expiration, some medications can retain their potency even several decades after their expiration dates. Expiration dates typically reflect a timeframe of known potency for drugs, but this does not necessarily mean that the drug will degrade after this timeframe, or that researchers have investigated the longer term stability of the drug. Amongst expired drugs, pills and powders tended to fair the best (especially if kept in temperate, dry conditions, as usually recommended on the label), whereas drug solutions and suspensions were more likely to deteriorate rapidly after their expiration dates. Reassuringly, there has yet to be a report of a drug becoming toxic after its expiration date.
Top 5 Causes of Death and Associated Risk Factors in the USA as of 2013
Graphics adapted from “When and Why People Die in the United States, 1990-2013” in the Journal of the American Medical Association
Top 5 Causes of Death and Associated Risk Factors: Women (all ages)
Top 5 Causes of Death and Associated Risk Factors: Men (all ages)
Original Sources: 1. GBD 2013 Mortality and Causes of Death Collaborators. Lancet. 2015;385(9963):117-171. 2. GBD 2013 Risk Factors Collaborators. Lancet. 2015;386(10010):2287-2323.
Feature image: See Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]