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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 take full effect. For this reason, drugs with a long half-life (e.g., amiodarone , elimination t 1 / 2 of about 58 days) are usually started with a loading dose to achieve their desired ...
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:
For example, the medical sciences refer to the biological half-life of drugs and other chemicals in the human body. The converse of half-life (in exponential growth) is doubling time. The original term, half-life period, dating to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the principle in 1907, was shortened to half-life in the early 1950s. [1]
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 .
A loading dose is most useful for drugs that are eliminated from the body relatively slowly, i.e. have a long systemic half-life. Such drugs need only a low maintenance dose in order to keep the amount of the drug in the body at the appropriate therapeutic level, but this also means that, without an initial higher dose, it would take a long ...
The plasma half-life or half life of elimination is the time required to eliminate 50% of the absorbed dose of a drug from an organism. Or put another way, the time that it takes for the plasma concentration to fall by half from its maximum levels.
The solution of this differential equation is useful in calculating the concentration after the administration of a single dose of drug via IV bolus injection: = C t is concentration after time t; C 0 is the initial concentration (t=0) K is the elimination rate constant
The AUC (from zero to infinity) represents the total drug exposure across time. AUC is a useful metric when trying to determine whether two formulations of the same dose (for example a capsule and a tablet) result in equal amounts of tissue or plasma exposure. Another use is in the therapeutic drug monitoring of drugs with a narrow therapeutic ...