Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In pharmacokinetics, a loading dose is an initial higher dose of a drug that may be given at the beginning of a course of treatment before dropping down to a lower maintenance dose. [1] A loading dose is most useful for drugs that are eliminated from the body relatively slowly, i.e. have a long systemic half-life.
In clinical practice, this means that it takes 4 to 5 times the half-life for a drug's serum concentration to reach steady state after regular dosing is started, stopped, or the dose changed. So, for example, digoxin has a half-life (or t 1 / 2 ) of 24–36 h; this means that a change in the dose will take the best part of a week to ...
Population pharmacokinetics seeks to identify the measurable pathophysiologic factors and explain sources of variability that cause changes in the dose-concentration relationship and the extent of these changes so that, if such changes are associated with clinically relevant and significant shifts in exposures that impact the therapeutic index ...
In pharmacokinetics, a maintenance dose is the maintenance rate [mg/h] of drug administration equal to the rate of elimination at steady state. This is not to be confused with dose regimen, which is a type of drug therapy in which the dose [mg] of a drug is given at a regular dosing interval on a repetitive basis.
In pharmacology, the volume of distribution (V D, also known as apparent volume of distribution, literally, volume of dilution [1]) is the theoretical volume that would be necessary to contain the total amount of an administered drug at the same concentration that it is observed in the blood plasma. [2]
In pharmacokinetics, the rate of infusion (or dosing rate) refers not just to the rate at which a drug is administered, but the desired rate at which a drug should be administered to achieve a steady state of a fixed dose which has been demonstrated to be therapeutically effective. Abbreviations include K in, [1] K 0, [2] or R 0.
It was proposed to be used instead of AUC in animal-to-human dose translation, as computer simulation shows that it could cope better with half-life and dosing schedule variations than AUC. This is an example of a PK/PD model, which combines pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. [13]
The elimination rate constant K or K e is a value used in pharmacokinetics to describe the rate at which a drug is removed from the human system. [1] It is often abbreviated K or K e. It is equivalent to the fraction of a substance that is removed per unit time measured at any particular instant and has units of T −1.