How to basify your urine - Some valuable knowledge

[iconoclast56]

I bought a tub of citric acid in the pharmacy for the hell of it and have been playing around making various salts and stuff. I looked up potassium citrate and found out something interesting about it. According to wikipedia:

Potassium citrate is rapidly absorbed when given by mouth and is excreted in the urine as the carbonate.

Thats actually its primary use in medicine:
http://www.medicinenet.com/potassium_citrate-oral_tablet/article.htm
for those of you who don't know, drug excretion is dependant on urine pH. For basic drugs like amphetamines or alkaloids, lower urine pH means less excretion.

 

[Alcyone]

For basic drugs like amphetamines or alkaloids, lower urine pH means less excretion.

No, it doesn't. It's the other way around. I can't be arsed to provide a source, this is pretty basic knowledge.

 

[Transform]

I think that's just a typo, because the rest of the logic follows - carbonate would raise the pH which would slow excretion.

The question is, how much? The RDA is 100mg of elemental potassium, so that allows you about 250mg of citrate.

100mg of potassium is 0.0025 moles, which makes 0.00125 moles of carbonate.

Dissolve this in 600 mls (2 bladder-loads) of urine and you have a 0.002M solution of carbonate.

I can't find any data for the basicity of potassium carbonate. I don't think this concentration would make much of a difference, but it might be worthwhile if you've got some on hand.

 

[Alcyone]

^ Agreed, the logic doesn't seem flawed initiallly. I suspect the OP got it right in his mind, but his thoughts got scrambled along the way and he surely got it wrong on the screen. Shit happens, I've done it myself more than once.

Instead of messing with potentially harmful doses of potassium citrate, you might want to look into carbonic anhydrase inhibitors such as acetazolamide (Diamox). It quickly and significantly raises urinary pH, not devoid of side effects of course, but reasonably safe when used in moderation.

Edit: Or just down a few spoonfuls of sodium bicarbonate stirred into a glass of water. Tastes a bit soapy, but not too bad, really.

 

[iconoclast56]

No, it doesn't. It's the other way around. I can't be arsed to provide a source, this is pretty basic knowledge.

Sorry I meant higher urine pH. At high pHs, the alkaloid remains as its freebase and can thus be reabsorbed easier and is harder to excrete by the kidneys.

 

[iconoclast56]

I can't find any data for the basicity of potassium carbonate. I don't think this concentration would make much of a difference, but it might be worthwhile if you've got some on hand.

I've got some KOH and NaHCO3 at hand, I'll figure out how to do a metathesis of some sort and get some K2CO3 to experiment with.

EDIT: Yeah, K2CO3 is way less soluble than Na2CO3 so adding KOH to a saturated Na2CO3 will result in K2CO3 precipitating out. I'll do it tomorrow when I've some time.

 

[sekio]

Don't go too overboard with the potassium salts, it can fuck with all sorts of stuff.
KCl is roughly 2x as toxic as 'regular' salt - LD50 of 2.6g vs 3-8g for NaCl.