I need help with reading a toxicology report?

labrat
#1. March 28th, 2009, at 4:05 PM.

These drugs alone can kill someone–taken all together for recreation you might as well be playing russian roulette with a gun.
At the same time, a low level combination of these meds can be therapuatic for people with chronic debilitating pain or agoraphobia.

These drugs are anti-anxiety (alpro) and pain medications (methadone and oxy)

There is no good answer to what is a toxic level, because everyones tolerence is different–especially if you are legally prescribed these medications.

Simonizer1218
#2. March 30th, 2009, at 9:31 PM.

First of all, none of these are normally present in blood. They are drugs. Alprazolam is a benzodiazepine (minor tranquilizer, in simple terms). Methadone is in the opiate class of drugs, as is oxycodone. The ng/ml is a quantitative way of describing how much of each is present. So in each 1 ml of blood there is 53 ng of alprazolam. One ng (nanogram) is 10^-9 grams, a very small amount, indeed. I don’t know offhand what toxic levels of each would be, but these levels seem way to low to be toxic. You could probably look up the toxicity on the internet.

Rachel F
#3. April 2nd, 2009, at 10:28 AM.

Alprazolam is normally used to treat anxiety. It is part of a group of drugs called benzodiazepines

Methadone is often used to help people who are addicted to opioid drugs such as morphine and heroin. Methadone is also an opioid drug but does not give a “high” so it helps the body to get used to not having the other drug (morphine or heroin). It can also be used for pain.

Oxycodone is also an opioid drug (similar to codeine) and is used as a painkiller.

All of these drugs can be abused, and this toxicology report suggests that the person either had a drug problem or had severe pain.

ng/mL is the amount of the drug in nanograms per millilitre of blood. A nanogram is 1/1000 000 000 of a gram and a millilitre is 1/1000 of a litre. This sounds very small, but drugs are commonly in the blood in ng/ml concentrations. ng/ml is the same as micrograms/litre (mcg/L; micro can also be shown as the greek symbol mu which looks like a funny u). Note: ng/mL = mcg/L NOT mcg/mL

It is not possible to know if these levels are toxic without knowing how long before the blood testing the drugs were taken, and it is also affected by many other things. The levels in this report seem to be what would be expected for someone taking these drugs but do not seem to be toxic levels for each drug alone – but when all 3 are taken together the effects could be more dangerous.

If this is a report of someone you know, you need to seek expert help to understand exactly what the toxicology report means.

abacaxitoo
#4. April 4th, 2009, at 8:37 PM.

and “flouridated” means the blood was collected with an anti-coagulant that contains flouride.