We Enjoy Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate So Much that Caffeine is in Donated Blood
What can we say? We love caffeine. At least that's what a
new study tells us that found traces of caffeine in every sample of
"pure" blood it received from a local blood bank.
Caffeine likely permeates our supply of donated blood
It's probably the world's most-consumed drug and it appears to be permeating the supply of donated blood if a new study in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis is correct.
"From a 'contamination' standpoint, caffeine is not a big
worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society,"
said Luying Chen, a Ph.D. student at OSU. "But the other drugs being in
there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for
those of us doing this type of research because it's hard to get clean
blood samples."In addition to caffeine, several samples tested positive for
alprazolam — often sold under the brand name Xanax — as well as
over-the-counter cough suppressant.
"The study leads you in that direction, though without doing
a comprehensive survey of vendors and blood banks we can only speculate
on how widespread the problem is," said van Breemen, the director of
OSU's Linus Pauling Institute. "Another thing to consider is that we
found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug
interaction assay validation - how many others are in there too that we
weren't looking for?"