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For many drugs, severe toxicities in humans occur at sublethal doses, which limit their maximum dose. A higher safety-based therapeutic index is preferable instead of a lower one; an individual would have to take a much higher dose of a drug to reach the lethal threshold than the dose taken to induce the therapeutic effect of the drug.
The median effective dose is the dose that produces a quantal effect (all or nothing) in 50% of the population that takes it (median referring to the 50% population base). [6] It is also sometimes abbreviated as the ED 50, meaning "effective dose for 50% of the population". The ED50 is commonly used as a measure of the reasonable expectancy of ...
Therapeutic (green) and side effect dose response curves (red) illustrating a typical starting and progressively increasing titrated doses (arrows). Drug titration is the process of adjusting the dose of a medication for the maximum benefit without adverse effects .
A loading dose is most useful for drugs that are eliminated from the body relatively slowly, i.e. have a long systemic half-life. Such drugs need only a low maintenance dose in order to keep the amount of the drug in the body at the appropriate therapeutic level , but this also means that, without an initial higher dose, it would take a long ...
Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is a branch of clinical chemistry and clinical pharmacology that specializes in the measurement of medication levels in blood. Its main focus is on drugs with a narrow therapeutic range , i.e. drugs that can easily be under- or overdosed. [ 1 ]
The therapeutic window is the amount of a medication between the amount that gives an effect (effective dose) and the amount that gives more adverse effects than desired effects. For instance, medication with a small pharmaceutical window must be administered with care and control, e.g. by frequently measuring blood concentration of the drug ...
Quantitatively, it is the ratio given by the toxic dose divided by the therapeutic dose. A protective index is the toxic dose of a drug for 50% of the population (TD 50) divided by the minimum effective dose for 50% of the population (ED 50). A high protective index is preferable to a low one: this corresponds to a situation in which one would ...
A dose is a measured quantity of a medicine, ... The term is usually applied to the quantity of a drug or other agent administered for therapeutic purposes, ...