Word: phenacetin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Warning Required. First of the currently popular analgesics to be questioned was phenacetin, the "P" in APC tablets (aspirin, phenacetin, caffeine). Medical centers in Europe reported that patients who had regularly taken large quantities of painkillers containing phenacetin had suffered kidney damage, and there had been a number of deaths. In 1964, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required a notice on the labels of remedies containing phenacetin: "Warning - this medication may damage the kidneys when used inlarge amounts or for a long period of time...
...used analgesics, alone and in combination. He reported in The Lancet that healthy volunteers who took ten aspirin tablets a day began to excrete damaged kidney cells, reflecting at least temporary kidney injury. Surprisingly, this effect was less marked with APCs. It was also less conspicuous when he tested phenacetin alone, and still less so with medicinal caffeine...
...Prescott's conclusion: phenacetin alone is not the primary villain in analgesic kidney damage. Back in his native Britain, he found that some of the supposedly phlegmatic Scots of the Grampian Hills were taking analgesic powders and tablets in overdoses that ran as high as ten tablets a day for 14 years. In a two-year period, 36 patients appeared at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with kidney disease and "a history of long-continued and excessive intake of analgesics." Besides their kidney damage, 30 of the patients were suffering from anemia, six had peptic ulcers and twelve had suffered gastrointestinal...
...upon the vast majority of members of one ethnic group; yet because of a hereditary quirk, some individuals will be made gravely ill. Best example, said Dr. Moser, is the tendency-rare in the general U.S. population-to a blood-destroying anemia that can develop after taking aspirin or phenacetin (compounded together in the familiar APC tablets), some sulfonamides, and drugs for the relief of peptic ulcer...
Caffeine, whether in coffee, tea or APC tablets (aspirin, phenacetin, caffeine), taken for a cold, definitely has a stimulating and sleep-postponing effect on a majority of people. But there is a substantial minority on whom, laboratory tests show, it has no effect at all. There are even a few people whom it puts to sleep...