Aspirin
Aspirin is one of the safest and least expensive pain relievers on the marketplace. While other pain relievers were discovered and manufactured before aspirin, they only gained acceptance as over-the-counter drugs in Europe and the United States after aspirin's success at the turn of the twentieth century.
Today, Americans alone consume 16,000 tons of aspirin tablets a year, equaling 80 million pills, and we spend about $2 billion a year for non-prescription pain relievers, many of which contain aspirin or similar drugs.
Currently, the drug is available in several dosage forms in various concentrations from .0021 to .00227 ounces (60 to 650 milligrams), but the drug is most widely used in tablet form. Other dosage forms include capsules, caplets, suppositories and liquid elixir.
Aspirin can be used to fight a host of health problems: cerebral thromboses (with less than one tablet a day); general pain or fever (two to six tablets a day); and diseases such as rheumatic fever, gout, and rheumatoid arthritis. The drug is also beneficial in helping to ward off heart attacks. In addition, biologists use aspirin to interfere with white blood cell action, and molecular biologists use the drug to activate genes.
The wide range of effects that aspirin can produce made it difficult to pinpoint how it actually works, and it wasn't until the 1970s that biologists hypothesized that aspirin and related drugs (such as ibuprofen) work by inhibiting the synthesis of certain hormones that cause pain and inflammation. Since then, scientists have made further progress in understanding how aspirin works. They now know, for instance, that aspirin and its relatives actually prevent the growth of cells that cause inflammation.
The compound from which the active ingredient in aspirin was first derived, salicylic acid, was found in the bark of a willow tree in 1763 by Reverend Edmund Stone of Chipping-Norton, England. (The bark from the willow tree--Salix Alba--contains high levels of salicin, the glycoside of salicylic acid.) Earlier accounts indicate that Hippocrates of ancient Greece used willow leaves for the same purpose--to reduce fever and relieve the aches of a variety of illnesses.
During the 1800s, various scientists extracted salicylic acid from willow bark and produced the compound synthetically. Then, in 1853, French chemist Charles F. Gerhardt synthesized a primitive form of aspirin, a derivative of salicylic acid. In 1897 Felix Hoffmann, a German chemist working at the Bayer division of I.G. Farber, discovered a better method for synthesizing the drug. Though sometimes Hoffmann is improperly given credit for the discovery of aspirin, he did understand that aspirin was an effective pain reliever that did not have the side effects of salicylic acid (it burned throats and upset stomachs).
Bayer marketed aspirin beginning in 1899 and dominated the production of pain relievers until after World War I, when Sterling Drug bought German-owned Bayer's New York operations. Today, "Aspirin" is a registered trademark of Bayer in many countries around the world, but in the United States and the United Kingdom aspirin is simply the common name for acetylsalicylic acid.
The manufacture of aspirin has paralleled advancements in pharmaceutical manufacturing as a whole, with significant mechanization occurring during the early twentieth century. Now, the manufacture of aspirin is highly automated and, in certain pharmaceutical companies, completely computerized.
While the aspirin production process varies between pharmaceutical companies, dosage forms and amounts, the process is not as complex as the process for many other drugs. In particular, the production of hard aspirin tablets requires only four ingredients: the active ingredient (acetylsalicylic acid), corn starch, water, and a lubricant.
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