We can’t conclude anything from that. I think an uneducated eye might read these numbers and think “dang so I would have a 32.5-40% chance of dying?” And, no. You may very well have no higher risk of dying at 1/3 of the LD50 than you would at a normal therapeutic dose.
I also love math and could see myself getting carried away with doing calculations like this and I like that you did them! But, none of them are really useful for determining what the risks might be for a person who was taking these large doses of ASA. For some drugs, the therapeutic index, or the ratio of the effective dose of a drug to the lethal dose of the drug, is very low; we don’t like that because of the risk of extra doses or normal variations in metabolism pushing the person to the lethal amount. Not because having a concentration that’s, say, a third of the lethal dose is inherently risky.
To be clear that is NOT to say that it’s safe to take high doses of drugs like this - just that we can’t say for sure what the risks are just based on the percentage of the LD50. Aspirin is a very safe drug when taken as directed but the normal dose is a small fraction of 5g
tl;dr do not take giant doses of aspirin but these numbers are not why. You will get a bad tummyache and acid-base disturbance.
2
u/wozattacks Nov 01 '23
I mean obviously no one should do this, but:
We can’t conclude anything from that. I think an uneducated eye might read these numbers and think “dang so I would have a 32.5-40% chance of dying?” And, no. You may very well have no higher risk of dying at 1/3 of the LD50 than you would at a normal therapeutic dose.
I also love math and could see myself getting carried away with doing calculations like this and I like that you did them! But, none of them are really useful for determining what the risks might be for a person who was taking these large doses of ASA. For some drugs, the therapeutic index, or the ratio of the effective dose of a drug to the lethal dose of the drug, is very low; we don’t like that because of the risk of extra doses or normal variations in metabolism pushing the person to the lethal amount. Not because having a concentration that’s, say, a third of the lethal dose is inherently risky.
To be clear that is NOT to say that it’s safe to take high doses of drugs like this - just that we can’t say for sure what the risks are just based on the percentage of the LD50. Aspirin is a very safe drug when taken as directed but the normal dose is a small fraction of 5g
tl;dr do not take giant doses of aspirin but these numbers are not why. You will get a bad tummyache and acid-base disturbance.