• Question: can you die from having botox?

    Asked by 357nepk25 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 6 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      You very, very easily could – it’s incredibly toxic so the margins of error are tiny! Injecting 2 nanograms per kilogram would probably be lethal so 140 ng would kill me if I weigh 70 kg. 1 ml of air weighs 1.2 mg (milligrams), which is 1200 ng, so a millilitre of air weighs eight and a half times as much as the lethal dose! Happily, the amounts of botox people inject are even smaller – I think they’re around 5-10 ng. That would mean you’d have to have 14 doses (or make a massive mistake) to be in danger. So in once sense, yes, you’re always nanograms from death with botox, but on the other hand you’d have to get it very, very wrong to be poisoned.
      (Take these calculations with a pinch of salt – I’m not an expert on this and all the information has come from the first page of google results!)

    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      Botox works by stopping nerve cells controlling muscle cells – so it paralyses muscles. For treating wrinkles, it paralyses the muscles of the face, reducing the wrinkles.
      Botox is produced by a type of bacteria called clostridium botulinum, and an infection from them can be deadly. So as Oli says, if you have enough botulinum toxin, it can be very deadly. But it’s used in such tiny amounts in cosmetic botox treatments that it’s likely very safe. I tried to find some research for you, and it seems a few people have died, but that’s because they didn’t go to a trained practitioner and they gave them the wrong dose! Almost everything can kill you if the dose is high enough, even oxygen!

Comments