PSA: Tylenol (aka acetaminophen or paracetamol) is quite dangerous

[browngirl]

The liver-destroying overdose is only about twice the effective dose recommended daily maximum dose (redbird, thank you for the correction), which is way too close for comfort. siderea posted an excellent explanation, including a partial list of OTC and prescription medications containing acetaminophen, inspired by an NPR report which nancylebov wrote about.

Comments

[grendelgongon.livejournal.com]

I'm not a MD, but I was an alcoholism researcher for most of a decade--

I have to wonder about the accuracy of this. The body is quite good at metabolizing alcohol, and for a typical person the alcohol in one drink is pretty fully metabolized by a max of about 3 hours out.

Heavy drinkers do have higher CYP2E1 levels, however, and my understanding is that these higher levels cause more of the acetominophen to be metabolized into toxic metabolites, though how big an effect this is (relative to the effect of poor liver function in heavy drinkers) is a good question.

I'm a bit dubious that very occasional drinking raises CYP2E1 levels all that much, though I haven't found much in the quick literature search I did one way or the other.

http://www.uspharmacist.com/content/d/feature/c/23857/

has some info to this effect with the caveat that I don't know much about this source and how authoritative it is, but it agrees with what I thought was the case.

Either way, I think there are plenty of reasons to be cautious about acetominophen, though.