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For example, gentamicin is an antibiotic that can be nephrotoxic (kidney damaging) and ototoxic (hearing damaging); measurement of gentamicin through concentrations in a patient's plasma and calculation of the AUC is used to guide the dosage of this drug. [3] AUC becomes useful for knowing the average concentration over a time interval, AUC/t.
[9] [21] [8] [25] The toxicity usually reverts once the antibiotic course has been completed, [8] and can be avoided altogether by less frequent dosing (such as once every 24 hours rather than once every 8 hours). [21] Amikacin can cause neuromuscular blockade (including acute muscular paralysis) and respiratory paralysis (including apnea). [9]
Its main focus is on drugs with a narrow therapeutic range, i.e. drugs that can easily be under- or overdosed. [1] TDM aimed at improving patient care by individually adjusting the dose of drugs for which clinical experience or clinical trials have shown it improved outcome in the general or special populations.
Once a drug's bioavailability has been established it is possible to calculate the changes that need to be made to its dosage in order to reach the required blood plasma levels. Bioavailability is, therefore, a mathematical factor for each individual drug that influences the administered dose.
In a medicine that is administered periodically, the trough level should be measured just before the administration of the next dose in order to avoid overdosing. [3] A trough level is contrasted with a "peak level" (C max), which is the highest level of the medicine in the body, and the "average level", which is the mean level over time. It is ...
Dosage typically includes information on the number of doses, intervals between administrations, and the overall treatment period. [3] For example, a dosage might be described as "200 mg twice daily for two weeks," where 200 mg represents the individual dose, twice daily indicates the frequency, and two weeks specifies the duration of treatment.
“The dose is really dependent on the patient.” Until more research is done, the jury is still out on whether the general population would benefit from taking daily aspirin to prevent colon cancer.
To ensure that the drug taker who has poor absorption is dosed appropriately, the bottom value of the deviation range is employed to represent real bioavailability and to calculate the drug dose needed for the drug taker to achieve systemic concentrations similar to the intravenous formulation. [4]