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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.
Threshold dose is the minimum dose of drug that triggers minimal detectable biological effect in an animal. [1] At extremely low doses, biological responses are absent for some of the drugs. The increase in dose above threshold dose induces an increase in the percentage of biological responses. [ 2 ]
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 1927, Sakel, who had recently qualified as a medical doctor in Vienna and was working in a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, began to use low (sub-coma) doses of insulin to treat drug addicts and psychopaths, and when one of the patients experienced improved mental clarity after having slipped into an accidental coma, Sakel reasoned the treatment might work for mentally ill patients. [3]
A dose–response curve is a coordinate graph relating the magnitude of a dose (stimulus) to the response of a biological system. A number of effects (or endpoints) can be studied. The applied dose is generally plotted on the X axis and the response is plotted on the Y axis. In some cases, it is the logarithm of the dose that is plotted on the ...
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.
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.
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 ]