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An effective half-life of the drug will involve a decay constant that represents the sum of the biological and physical decay constants, as in the formula: = + With the decay constant it is possible to calculate the effective half-life using the formula:
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 ...
In this situation it is generally uncommon to talk about half-life in the first place, but sometimes people will describe the decay in terms of its "first half-life", "second half-life", etc., where the first half-life is defined as the time required for decay from the initial value to 50%, the second half-life is from 50% to 25%, and so on.
Another use is in the therapeutic drug monitoring of drugs with a narrow therapeutic index. 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 ...
t 1/2 is the half-life time of the drug, which is the time needed for the plasma drug concentration to drop to its half Therefore, the amount of drug present in the body at time t A t {\displaystyle A_{t}} is;
The rate at which a drug enters into the body for oral and other extravascular routes. 0.693 h −1: Elimination half-life: The time required for the concentration of the drug to reach half of its original value.
The absorption rate constant K a is a value used in pharmacokinetics to describe the rate at which a drug enters into the system. It is expressed in units of time −1. [1] The K a is related to the absorption half-life (t 1/2a) per the following equation: K a = ln(2) / t 1/2a. [1] K a values can typically only be found in research articles. [2]
In pharmacology, clearance is a pharmacokinetic parameter representing the efficiency of drug elimination. This is the rate of elimination of a substance divided by its concentration. [ 1 ] The parameter also indicates the theoretical volume of plasma from which a substance would be completely removed per unit time.