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Levetiracetam, sold under the brand name Keppra among others, is a novel antiepileptic drug [7] used to treat epilepsy. [8] It is used for partial-onset , myoclonic , or tonic–clonic seizures, [ 7 ] and is taken either by mouth as an immediate or extended release formulation or by injection into a vein .
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 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.
The model outputs for a drug can be used in industry (for example, in calculating bioequivalence when designing generic drugs) or in the clinical application of pharmacokinetic concepts. Clinical pharmacokinetics provides many performance guidelines for effective and efficient use of drugs for human-health professionals and in veterinary medicine .
An equianalgesic chart can be a useful tool, but the user must take care to correct for all relevant variables such as route of administration, cross tolerance, half-life and the bioavailability of a drug. [5] For example, the narcotic levorphanol is 4–8 times stronger than morphine, but also has a much longer half-life. Simply switching the ...
A recent survey of 675 nurses in the United States indicated that 30% of respondents knew how AI is used in clinical nursing practice, but 70% had only fair or even no knowledge of the technology ...
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.
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]