More glove compartment research

The other glove compartment project we are working on involves a pill box like the one shown below, except that each compartment contains not only ibuprofen pills but also a couple of aspirin pills. This idea came from my mother-in-law, Leslie, who was telling me about someone she knows who keeps all of their medications in one container. I am sure this is pretty common for people who carry around multiple types of medicine.

The chemical name for aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. When it degrades, the major product is a similar molecule called salicylic acid. (It also relieves pain, but not as effectively. Hippocrates wrote in the 5 B.C. about chewing willow bark for its therapeutic properties - that is a source of salicylic acid). When aspirin breaks down into salicylic acid, it also releases acetic acid. Acetic acid is what makes vinegar smell like vinegar. So, if you have ever opened a bottle of aspirin and smelled vinegar, that is why. Here's the reaction:



So, why are we putting aspirin and ibuprofen together in the glove compartment? We are wondering if the acetic acid released from the aspirin will cause some accelerated degradation of our ibuprofen. That is, if ibuprofen degrades in the glove compartment due to high temperature, will it degrade even more if there it is exposed to acetic acid at the same time?

If you have any other ideas on medicines that people might carry around in the same container, let us know! Aspirin is a good one because we know that the acetic acid is formed and emitted by the tablets.

If you have any old vinegary aspirin in your medicine cabinet, feel free to send it to us! It's a great example of drug degradation for the students, because you can actually smell it - you don't need a complicated chemical analysis to detect the presence of acetic acid.

Glove Compartment research

The idea for this experiment came from Corby, who told me that his dad keeps ibuprofen in his glove compartment of his car. I started thinking about how hot it might get in a glove compartment, especially in Charleston in the summertime. So we decided to package up several brands of ibuprofen and send them to people around the country to store in their glove compartment over the summer. The packages look like this:


There are seven brands of ibuprofen pills, including name brand (Advil and Motrin) as well as several generic brands (Walgreens, WalMart, Costco, etc.)

The packages will be left in the glove compartments from Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day weekend. (To our participants, if the packages are not in your glove compartment yet, that's OK. Just let us know what day they are put in.) Then our participants will send them back to us for analysis.

We know from our lab experiments that ibuprofen pills that are exposed to heat and humidity over time will degrade. In the glove compartments, we only expect them to be exposed to heat, because the package will protect them from high humidity. So we don't really know what might happen. We'll be monitoring the temperatures of the locations, and we will note which cars spend days and/or nights in garages and which ones don't. Here is a map to show you all of the locations across the country that we are lucky enough to have access to glove compartments.

Thanks for helping us!

Thanks again to those of you who are helping us with our ibuprofen research. The purpose of this blog is to share information and show you some pictures of what we are working with. We have gotten ibuprofen from Argentina, France, China, Australia, Czech Republic and Japan. We will share pictures of these as we begin preparing them as samples. If you have any contacts in other countries who might be willing to send us some ibuprofen, we would be thrilled to have samples from as many countries as we can get! The more exotic, the better.

This is my favorite package, from Japan. It was sent to us by Justin Wyatt, another C of C professor, who has been in Australia for the past year on sabbatical. Thanks Justin!



It reminds me of the package of soap with Homer as Mr. Sparkle:



I took Japanese in college, and while I don't remember much, I can read the characters (when I have an idea already of what they say). Japanese characters like these stand for a syllable rather than a single letter. The yellow letters on the ibuprofen label say "eye-be-be-ro-fe-n" and the Mr. Sparkles label says "mi-su-ta-a sa-pa-a-ra-ku". Japanese uses 3 alphabets, and these characters are from the alphabet they use for words that are not Japanese. Like ibuprofen and Mr. Sparkles.

Homer seems to be saying "ha-ku-u ku-ri-i-tsu," I could be wrong about that, since it doesn't make any sense. Does it?

I just thought I would share that with you!

Working with me on this research is Corby Harris, who will be posting to the blog as well. You can check back periodically for new information and interesting tidbits such as the one above.

Soon we will have a post concerning our Glove Compartment research, including information about the samples that we are sending to many of you around the US. We hope you will receive them by this weekend; please put them in your glove compartment when you receive them and you can email us to let us know when you get them in place at:

coryw@cofc.edu


Thanks again for your help!