Are 4 Paracetamol tablets (2000mg altogether) enough to kill you?

Question

I was just curious.

Answer 1

No. An overdose which may cause worst effects is with an intake of about 30 tablets (500 mg each) paracetamol taken in a single dose.

Answer 2

No, probably not, if it was once off.

Paracetamol is actually one of the safest drugs available. It's major side-effect is on the liver, where in very high doses it can cause liver failure.

There are two major occasions when paracetamol is particularly dangerous:

1. In patients with significant liver disease already. In these patients, there is not much of the liver properly functioning, so taking the sort of dose that would be fine in a normal person can knock off the last remaining liver reserve and cause liver failure.

2. In alcohol-abusing people. The details are quite lengthy, but in these people, the liver breaks some of the paracetamol to down to a toxic by-product, instead of converting it all to a safer one. It is reckoned that as little as 4g of a paracetamol taken over a period of a few hours may cause liver failure in alcoholic patients. So don't take paracetamol for hangovers if you're going to need more than one or two!

In other words, provided the 2g of paracetamol was taken by a healthy adult patient on a single occasion, it won't kill you.

Answer 3

That dose is fairly certain to cause liver failure and possibly a lingering death if you happen to weight four kilograms, but six-month-olds aren't very good at swallowing tablets. I think you're safe.
On the other hand, paracetamol exhibits a ceiling effect; that is, a two gram dose relieves pain no better than a one gram dose, so it's silly to take the larger dose.