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This type of adverse effect that results from pharmaceutical drug exposure is commonly due to interactions of the drug with its intended target. In this case, both the therapeutic and toxic targets are the same. To avoid toxicity during treatment, many times the drug needs to be changed to target a different aspect of the illness or symptoms.
Even less safe are drugs such as digoxin, a cardiac glycoside; its therapeutic index is approximately 2:1. [12] Other examples of drugs with a narrow therapeutic range, which may require drug monitoring both to achieve therapeutic levels and to minimize toxicity, include dimercaprol, theophylline, warfarin and lithium carbonate.
Some unaltered drugs, such as penicillin, will bind avidly to proteins. Others must be bioactivated into a toxic compound that will in turn bind to proteins. The second criterion of cellular damage can come either from a toxic drug/drug metabolite, or from an injury or infection. These will sensitize the immune system to the drug and cause a ...
The ED50 is commonly used as a measure of the reasonable expectancy of a drug effect, but does not necessarily represent the dose that a clinician might use. This depends on the need for the effect, and also the toxicity. The toxicity and even the lethality of a drug can be quantified by the TD 50 and LD 50 respectively. Ideally, the effective ...
Negative values of the decimal logarithm of the median lethal dose LD 50 (−log 10 (LD 50)) on a linearized toxicity scale encompassing 11 orders of magnitude. Water occupies the lowest toxicity position (1) while the toxicity scale is dominated by the botulinum toxin (12). [107] The LD 50 values have a very wide range.
The mechanism of action is a crucial factor in determining effect and toxicity of the drug, taking in consideration the pharmacokinetic (PK) factors. [12] The sort and extent of altered cellular physiology will depend on the combination of the drug's presence (as established by pharmacokinetic (PK) studies) and/or its mechanism and duration of ...
Drug metabolism is the metabolic breakdown of drugs by living organisms, usually through specialized enzymatic systems. More generally, xenobiotic metabolism (from the Greek xenos "stranger" and biotic "related to living beings") is the set of metabolic pathways that modify the chemical structure of xenobiotics, which are compounds foreign to an organism's normal biochemistry, such as any drug ...
Toxicity is the degree to which a chemical substance or a particular mixture of substances can damage an organism. [1] Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, bacterium, or plant, as well as the effect on a substructure of the organism, such as a cell (cytotoxicity) or an organ such as the liver (hepatotoxicity).