Bitter almond

The seeds of apricot, wild apricot, mountain apricot and northeastern apricot of the Rosaceae family.

Bitter; warm; poisonous.

Internally: decoction, 3-10g; or into pills, bulk. External use: pounding compress.

Contraindications

Contraindicated in cases of yin deficiency, cough and loose stools.

2. The Collected Notes of the Classic of Materia Medica (本草经集注)：Get fire good. Wicked Huangqi, Scutellaria baicalensis, Pueraria lobata. Fear of a kind of grass.

3. The Classic of Materia Medica (本草经疏)：Yin deficiency cough, the lung family has a deficiency of heat, hot phlegm people avoid it.

4. "The Materia Medica": Do not use it if you have a deficiency of vital energy, for fear that it will sink and drain too much.

5. "Ben Jing Feng Yuan": the death of the blood family is especially prohibited.

6. "Materia Medica from the new": because of the deficiency and cough constipation people avoid.

~~Overdose of bitter almonds, poisoning can occur, manifested as vertigo, sudden fainting, palpitations, headache, nausea and vomiting, convulsions, coma, cyanosis, pupil dilation, loss of reaction to light, weak and slow pulse, shortness of breath or slow and irregular. If not rescued in time, death may result from respiratory failure. Poisoned people take apricot bark or apricot root decoction can be rescued, see "apricot bark", "apricot root" article. LD50 of amygdalin: rat, mouse intravenous injection of 25g/kg; rat intraperitoneal injection of 8g/kg. rat op is 0.6g/kg. MTD: mice, rabbits, dogs, intravenous and intramuscular injection are 3g/kg; oral are 0.075g/kg; human intravenous injection of 5g (about 0.07g/kg). People orally ingested 55 pieces of bitter almond (about 60g), containing about 1.8g of amygdalin (about 0.024g/kg), can be fatal. Bitter almonds in large quantities orally easy to produce poisoning. Firstly, it acts on the vomiting, respiratory, vagus and vasomotor centers of the medulla oblongata, causing excitement, followed by coma, convulsions, and then paralysis of the whole central nervous system, and death due to paralysis of the respiratory center. Its toxic mechanism is mainly due to the fact that the hydrocyanic acid contained in almonds reacts easily with the trivalent iron of cytochrome oxidase in the mitochondria, forming a cytochrome oxidase-cyano complex, which leads to the inhibition of cellular respiration and the formation of tissue asphyxiation, resulting in death. Due to the presence of β-glucosidase in the intestinal flora, oral administration of 600 mg/kg of bitter amygdalin to normal rats resulted in death within 2-5 hours. The CN- in blood reached 2.6-4.5 μg/ml; while the same dose of bitter amygdalin was given to germ-free mice, there was no death in the mice; the CN- in blood was less than 0.4 μg/ml.It indicated that the intestinal flora was the root cause of the toxicity of bitter amygdalin orally, and the toxicity of bitter amygdalin is about 40-fold greater than that of static injection. With the Ames method, TA100 strain, S-9, Mix (+), bitter amygdalin was lethal.