![]() Related: DIY Dollar Store First Aid Kit How to Store Medications in the Refrigerator Your medicine box will need to be big enough to accommodate the bottles and packages of the medications you are storing. A lockable box also helps keep them safe from accidentally accessing your medications.ĭrugs should also be kept in their original containers for storage, both to protect them and to ensure nobody mistakes them for different drugs at a later date. Many medications can be dangerous if taken accidentally by children or pets, so keeping your medicine box out of the reach and sight of children is very important. The silica gel will need to be checked from time to time and replaced or refreshed, if it has changed color. You can maintain a dark and dry environment for your medications using a sealed opaque box, and including a couple of sachets of silica gel to reduce humidity. The temperature recommendations for different drugs vary, but can be broadly grouped into two categories: refrigerator and room temperature. Direct light can cause intense temperature changes, as well as causing some medications to degrade. Humidity can damage the physical structure of the medication and cause the active ingredients to break down more quickly. ** Once opened, bottle can be stored at room temperature (up to 77☏ or 25☌).įrom this information, we can see that the manufacturer’s recommendations are almost always to keep medications away from humidity and direct light. *Inhaler canister can burst if temperature exceeds 120☏ (49☌). You will find below the printed storage recommendations for 15 commonly prescribed medications in the United States: Drug What Are the Manufacturer’s Recommendations? This article focuses on those recommendations and how to store medications to keep them in good condition for as long as possible. In our recent article discussing the real expiration date of the drugs in your medicine cabinet, we established that storing drugs in line with the manufacturer’s recommendations is important, if we are to consider using the drugs past their printed expiration date. We do not advocate for the use of medications outside of their formal licensing and hold no liability for the consequences of misuse of any information provided within this article. The FDA/TPD/etc could require longer stability protocols - but you’d still have an expiration date reflecting that obtained data and we’d simply be discussing why drugs expire after 5 years and not 3 or whatever.Disclaimer: This article is for interest and information purposes only. And again, no pharmaceutical company in the world tests beyond what is legally required of them. Sure, you can smell it with milk, and you could test a drug and compare it to it’s potency/impurity requirements, but those are destructive tests and you wouldn’t have the pill anymore. There simply is no way whatsoever to accurately predict when the drug will go from “still safe” to “kinda risky” to “it’s gonna kill you” (assuming it could get that bad!) Just like you don’t know quite when the old milk in your fridge goes bad, but you know it does. No company studies it because no law requires them do, and they aren’t going to waste their money on very expensive tests that aren’t required. That’s the catch beyond the legally required data obtained during stability there is no data whatsoever to know how the drug behaves past the required timeframe. If something was safe in “April 2011” that generally is considered to be the last day of the month anyways (on paperwork), and obviously the drug is not immediately toxic on May 1st. It’s also just as obvious that drugs aren’t a time bomb. There’s obviously a buffer region between the data collected during stability studies and the date range on the bottle. I’ve seen degradation product limits in the range of No More Than 0.1% of the active amount, which isn’t really a lot, but there’s reason to believe (or know) that that degradation product is unsafe for patients. When the drug degrades, the various products it becomes might be harmless or harmful, and some in very small quantities. 97.8% wouldn’t (in most cases…some drugs have a slightly wider range of allowable potency). ![]() On day 1 it could be at 101.4% of label strength and on the last day at 98.7% of label strength and both of those still pass stability. The thing is, a typical stability protocol is 3 years or so, and while the large amount of data collected shows that the drug is within acceptable limits during the shelf life/expiration time assigned to it, it doesn’t mean that some degradation isn’t happening. If a lot “goes bad” and fails stability testing, it gets recalled. It’s part of the drug approval protocol to get it on the market, and lots of drugs are continually tested for as long as the drug is manufactured and sold. It’s not a concern in drugs manufactured in developed countries because these countries do stability testing.
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