Dose banding as an alternative to body surface area-based dosing of chemotherapeutic agents

Body surface area in dosing anticancer agents: scratch the surface!

Grochow et al. (1) questioned the use of body surface area in dose normalization more than a decade ago in this Journal. In this issue, Baker et al. (2) retrospectively assessed the pharmacokinetics of 33 investigational agents tested in phase I trials during the past decade as a function of body surface area in 1650 adult cancer patients. Based on their findings, they recommend that the practi...

Flat-fixed dosing versus body surface area based dosing of anticancer drugs: there is a difference.

In a recent review, Mathijssen et al. [1] proposed using flatfixed dosing regimens rather than body surface area (BSA)based dosing for anticancer drugs because “it does not seem worse than using BSA-based dosing” with regard to pharmacokinetic variability. We feel that this statement, together with other recent publications arguing against BSAbased dosing, requires a counterpart. Most cytotoxic...

Medication Errors in Administration of Chemotherapeutic Agents: an Observational Study

Chemotherapy medication errors may lead to potentially harmful consequences while most of them could be preventable. This study aims to determine the incidence and type of drug handling and administration errors among the nurses and to identify possible contributing factors. Setting of the study was a teaching hospital affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medic...

Enzymes as Chemotherapeutic Agents

Comparison of weight- vs body surface area-based growth hormone dosing for children: implications for response.

OBJECTIVE To compare weight (per kg)- vs body surface area (BSA, per m(2) )-based growth hormone (GH) dosing formats in children and to derive a useful conversion formula between the two formats. PATIENTS AND DESIGN Growth hormone doses (>33,000) from 1874 children were obtained from the national Australian database (OZGROW) and used to derive conversion formulae and to confirm the accuracy o...