Inactive ingredients in pills and capsules may cause allergic, adverse reactions: Majority of oral medications available to consumers contain ingredients that can affect sensitive individuals -- ScienceDaily

The majority of oral medications available to consumers contain ingredients that can affect sensitive individuals. A new study led by a team of investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that the vast majority of the most frequently prescribed medications in the U.S. contain at least one ingredient capable of causing an adverse reaction. Known as inactive ingredients, these components are added to improve the taste, shelf-life, absorption and other characteristics of a pill, but the authors found that more than 90 percent of all oral medications tested contained at least one ingredient that can cause allergic or gastrointestinal symptoms in sensitive individuals. Such ingredients include lactose, peanut oil, gluten and chemical dyes. The team's findings are published online in Science Translational Medicine.

The team found a total of 38 inactive ingredients that have been described in the literature to cause allergic symptoms after oral exposure. The authors report that 92.8 percent of the medications they analyzed contained at least one of these inactive ingredients. Specifically, they report:

• Approximately 45 percent of medications contained lactose;
• approximately 33 percent of medications contained a food dye;
• while only 0.08 percent of medications contained peanut oil, for certain drugs -- such as progesterone -- there are few alternatives that do not contain this inactive ingredient.

"While we call these ingredients 'inactive,' in many cases, they are not. While the doses may be low, we don't know what the threshold is for individuals to react in the majority of instances," said Traverso. "This pushes us to think about precision care and about the role for regulation and legislation when it comes to labeling medications that contain an ingredient that may cause an adverse reaction."

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