Happy Birthday Tylenol
Tylenol turns 50 this week.
Medgaget
has the birthday celebration and a retrospective:
Tylenol at 50
Acetaminophen. Paracetemol. APAP. Tylenol. Any way you say it, this drug has become synonymous with pain and fever relief. And this week, Tylenol turns 50. What began as a children's elixir has now hit middle age.
The story of its discovery is steeped in the organic chemistry of urine metabolites of the analgesics in use during the 1890's. It was not until decades later that scientists realized acetaminophen was far less toxic than other alternatives:In 1946, the Institute for the Study of Analgesic and Sedative Drugs awarded a grant to the New York City Department of Health to study the problems associated with analgesic agents. Bernard Brodie and Julius Axelrod were assigned to investigate why non-aspirin agents were associated with the development of methemoglobinemia, a non-lethal blood condition. In 1948, Brodie and Axelrod linked the use of acetanilide with methemoglobinemia and determined that the analgesic effect of acetanilide was due to its active metabolite paracetamol. They advocated the use of paracetamol (acetaminophen), since it did not have the toxic effects of acetanilide.
The product went on sale in the United States in 1955 under the brand name Tylenol.
It's been ingested by billions, and prescribed by some of us just yesterday. But how it works is still not clearly understood.
Medgaget explores some of the ideas of how it works and touches on the 1982 Cyanide tampering that killed seven people in Chicago.
One of those "little miracles" that we all to often take for granted.
Posted by DaveH at November 5, 2005 8:37 PM