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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 ...
Drug titration is the process of adjusting the dose of a medication for the maximum benefit without adverse effects. [1] When a drug has a narrow therapeutic index, titration is especially important, because the range between the dose at which a drug is effective and the dose at which side effects occur is small. [2]
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 ...
Drugs come with a recommended dose in milligrams or micrograms per kilogram of body weight, and that is used in conjunction with the patient's age and body weight to determine a safe dose. In single-dose scenarios, the patient's body weight and the drug's recommended dose per kilogram are used to determine a safe one-time dose.
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 ...
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 ]
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 ...