Take this little blue pill and the whole world turns blue...

Drugs can help relieve illness, but sometimes they do weird things to the body. Learn about 6 weird drug side effects.

Green Blood

In October 2005, several Canadian doctors were startled by a patient in the operating room.

This was a 42-year-old man who needed emergency surgery for compartment syndrome in his calf. What really puzzled the doctors was not his leg condition, but his blood - when the radial artery was cannulated, the doctors found dark green blood flowing out of his veins.

These "green blood" samples were sent to the testing room, and the results showed that the source of the green color was sulfurized hemoglobin, which should be produced by sumatriptan, a drug for treating migraines that the patient took . In the past few months, the patient has been taking this drug, and he has taken a lot of it - 200 mg a day, which is the upper limit of the 24-hour dose. Doctors speculated that this drug containing a sulfonamide group caused the sulfurization of hemoglobin. Later, the patient's condition gradually recovered. Five weeks after stopping taking this drug, the sulfur hemoglobin in his blood also disappeared.

Blue in front of my eyes

Sometimes, taking a blue pill might make the world blue. Sildenafil is the active ingredient in the little blue pill Viagra, the best-known prescription drug for erectile dysfunction. This drug and several other similar drugs can cause a relatively rare side effect - bluish vision, which means seeing things with a blue tint.

The side effect of visual abnormalities is related to the working principle of sildenafil. It improves erectile dysfunction by inhibiting an enzyme called "PDE5", and at the same time, this drug will also inhibit another somewhat similar enzyme-PDE6, but to a lesser extent. PDE6 exists in the cones and rods of the retina, and it is involved in the transmission and regulation of visual signals.

Addiction to gambling

Ropinirole is a Parkinson's drug that doctors use to relieve patients' body tremors. At the same time, this drug has caused some patients to do something strange - they suddenly become addicted to gambling.

This condition is called "Impulse Control Disorder" by medical experts . People with this disorder may be overly addicted to shopping, food, sex and other things and lose control of themselves, not just gambling. In addition to ropinirole, another drug that acts on dopamine receptors, pramipexole, is also related to these problems. They should have an impact on the "reward system" in the brain. For this reason, the FDA has also added a warning to the drug instructions.

Fingerprints disappear

Capecitabine, a chemotherapy drug used to treat cancer, is more likely to cause skin side effects on the palms and soles of the feet, including pigmentation, redness, pain - and fading and disappearance of fingerprints. Patients sometimes find that they can no longer use fingerprint recognition to open door locks or unlock smartphones. Sometimes, the disappeared fingerprints can be restored, but some patients still cannot get their fingerprints back after stopping the drug.

Straight hair to curly

Sodium valproate, a drug used to control epilepsy and mania, has a problem with hair. The drug can sometimes cause temporary hair loss, and more rarely, it can change the texture of hair: People with smooth, straight hair may end up with curly hair after taking the drug.

The mechanism of hair curly hair is not clear, but it may be the result of the drug affecting some enzymes in the body. This side effect does not always become a problem: in the medical report, a patient with curly hair said that she liked her new hairstyle very much and had no problem not changing the drug.

Cooking in a dream

Doctors often prescribe a sleeping pill called zolpidem to people suffering from sleep disorders. It allows people to fall asleep quickly, but sometimes it can also cause some weird hallucinations and sleepwalking side effects. According to previous reports, people who take the drug may sometimes eat, make food, make phone calls, open their phones to order strange products in a daze, and even drive out for a ride - and when they wake up the next day, they usually don't remember what happened before.

These situations are not only confusing, they can also pose safety risks, so the drug instructions also include special warnings about these side effects - yes, this is a drug that has cooking in dreams and driving in dreams written into the instructions.

References

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)60918-0/fulltext

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12207947

[3] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2008/020658s018s020s021lbl.pdf

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4730937/#b4-cpn-14-114

[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2546175

[6] https://academic.oup.com/annonc/article/20/7/1281/346539

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298917/

Planning and production

Source: Guokr (ID: Guokr42)

Editor: Yang Yaping

Proofread by Xu Lai and Lin Lin