Does copper interact with any medications?

The NIH states copper has no known clinically relevant interactions with medications.

What this means for you

Copper is not known to have any clinically relevant interactions with medications, and this page could stop there. The reason it does not is that the most common way to become copper deficient is still something you take from a bottle.

Not for everyone. Regular high doses of zinc from supplements, and heavy use of zinc-containing denture creams, block copper absorption well enough to cause a real deficiency. The result is anaemia, loss of skin pigment, unsteady movement and more infections.

Zinc is not a medicine, which is exactly why it slips past the question "what medications are you on". If you have been on high-dose zinc for months and feel unusually tired, or notice numbness or unsteadiness, copper is worth raising rather than guessing at.

The interaction you can create yourself

Established. Copper still has no known clinically relevant interaction with medicines. The thing that does move copper is sold on the same shelf as copper. Zinc acetate at 50 mg three times a day for four weeks, the standard Wilson disease regimen, cut the copper in the livers of healthy people to 56 per cent of baseline, and zinc gluconate on the same schedule to 49 per cent. Once-daily 150 mg schedules did less. That is the dose a person can buy and take through a winter without telling anyone.

Two findings keep this in proportion. In the same study the liver copper reading wobbled by about a fifth from one day to the next in the same person, so small differences cannot be resolved at all, and five of 37 participants showed no measurable response to any zinc schedule. And pooling 21 trials in nearly 4,000 children given 10 to 20 mg a day for four to 15 months, haemoglobin stayed where it was, with no difference by age, dose, duration or starting level. The mechanism is real and ordinary doses do not reliably produce the anaemia it predicts.

Where the dose is larger the effect shows up quickly and then fades. After coronary bypass surgery, patients given zinc with vitamin E had significantly lower plasma copper on the third day afterwards, and by day 21 the two groups were level again.

If you are taking zinc on purpose

The practical rule is duration. A short course is not the problem. Months of a high-dose zinc supplement, or generous daily use of a zinc-heavy denture cream, is where copper deficiency comes from, and its signs are easy to blame on something else. Tell whoever prescribes for you that you take it.

Two numbers to work between if copper is going back in. Europe treats about 5 mg a day as the point where copper starts to accumulate and puts its safe level near 4.9 mg for a 70 kilogram adult, half the American ceiling of 10 mg. And food covers the 0.9 mg requirement with room to spare: one 85 gram slice of beef liver carries about 12.3 mg on its own.

Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.

Full guide: Copper: the mineral most people only hear about when zinc goes wrong