With finals approaching, more students will be up late studying. They might drink coffee or soda, or pop a few NoDoz pills. Those might seem like a solution to stay awake, but the effects of caffeine are more drastic than just providing alertness.

“It can make your heart race, it can give you headaches, it can give you stomach upset. It might actually keep you awake but it’s not a useful awake,” said Marc Shulman, staff physician at the Thielen Student Health Center.

He said although a student can stay awake because he or she has consumed caffeine, memory and concentration can suffer.

There are an assortment of products today that contain caffeine, but Shulman said stay-awake pills contain the highest concentration of caffeine.

“One pill is probably the same as about five shots of espressos or two regular cups of coffee,” he said.

Shulman added that small amounts of caffeine can keep a person awake, but warned that people have died of caffeine overdose.

“A cup of coffee or a soda once a day isn’t bad, but going above that is bad,” he said.

He mentioned the nicotine in cigarettes is similar to caffeine because it works as a stimulant.

However, it would take a number of cigarettes to get the same effect as caffeine.

There are many stay-awake pills available to purchase. Caffeine or guaranine – a Brazilian extract that is the same as caffeine – would be listed with the ingredients on the bottle.

Suzanne Hendrich, professor of food science and human nutrition, said she didn’t know which caffeine products have the highest concentration, but figured that alertness tablets are the worst to take.

“Coffee contains about 150 milligrams [of caffeine] per cup,” she said.

Hendrich said sleep loss, nervousness, being shaky and hyperirritability can occur when overdosing on caffeine.

“Five to 10 cups [of coffee] in a relatively short period of time can have those overdose effects,” she said.

Iced tea, black tea and chocolate are products that also contain caffeine.