photo courtesy myorganicchemistry.wikispaces.com

Some days you just feel like exploding and this made me think naturally, of nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine was first made by an Italian chemistAscanioSobrero in 1847 at the university of Turin. He warned against using it as an explosive but human nature being what it is, the development of explosives was inevitable. It was a very unstable compound. All you needed to do was shake it and boom it would explode. It was due to the death of his brother and several other factory workers who were killed in 1864, at the Nobel armaments factory in Sweden and numerous other fatal explosions of liquid nitroglycerine that the Nobel factory had shipped to California for railroad building purposes, that Alfred Nobel set about creating a safer compound. In 1867 dynamitewas developed by the Nobel company. He held tight patents on dynamite and of the other compounds developed to get around these patents gelignite in 1875 was the most well known . It was noted that nitroglycerine helped alleviate chest pain in armament factory workers and in 1878 Dr William Murrell used tiny doses to treat angina and to lower the blood pressure in his hospital patients.

Nitroglycerine has three major uses. Firstly, as an explosive the work done by Alfred Nobel has been put to use in many civil engineering tasks such as road building, construction of railroad tunnels, for mining, clearing farmland and demolition work.
It’s second use is as a propellant for use in firearms. Nitroglycerine has virtually no smoke on detonation and is used in combination with nitrocellulose which was a huge improvement over the previously used black gun powder. Originally it was used only by the military but it was soon adapted for civilian and sporting use.
It’s third use, for me is the most exciting, as a treatment for heart pain (angina). Interestingly it has also been an indirect cause of renal failure. This occurred because nitroglycerine is a potent vasodilator – that is, it dilates/enlarges the blood vessels allowing a greater blood flow which is why it helps in angina by getting more oxygenated blood to the coronary arteries. Not only does it dilate the coronary vessels but also those in the brain and elsewhere which leads to other effects such as headache and lowered blood pressure.

During the war when women were working in the munitions factories most suffered from severe headaches due to the nitroglycerine they were exposed to. As a result standard issue of APC powders were given to all the workers and eventually became an accepted social remedy. Men would drink beer and women would take the powders. These were the cause of a huge number of renal failure cases in Australia.

Headaches are also a common side effect of nitroglycerine in treating angina. They developed nitroglycerine patches in the hope of giving a constant relief and to decrease the headache problem although for many it still occurred. I remember one patient complaining of severe headaches and the doctor, in desperation, said to him “put it further away from your head. That might help.”  The fellow reported back that he had done this with good effect having put it on his nether region. In fact he was thrilled, – he had blood flow where he had not had it for years, with no headache but he reported his wife was now very unhappy as it was she who developed the headache.

In medicine nitroglyerine is known as glycerol trinitrate. Ironically, Alfred Nobel a few months before his death in 1896 was prescribed nitroglycerine for his heart. He wrote to a friend “ isn’t it the irony of fate that I have been prescribed nitroglycerine, to be taken internally! They call it trinitryn, so as not to scare the chemist or the public.”

In its almost one hundred and eighty year existence nitroglycerine has had a colourful history as an explosive, a propellant and in its use in the treatment of heart conditions, and …. I no longer feel like exploding.