I need help with reading a toxicology report?

Question

Drug name Quantitative Results

alprazolam blood, fluoridated 53 ng/mL

methadone blood, fluoridated 231 ng/mL

oxycodone blood, fluoridated 54 ng/mL

What does that all mean? What are those drugs? What are normal levels? What is ng/mL? What are toxic levels? Could the combination of these kill someone? Please give as much info as possible, in simple terms. Thanks

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.