Laboratory guidelines for monitoring of antimicrobial drugs

Laboratory Guidelines for Screening, Diagnosis and Monitoring of Hepatic Injury

Guidelines for the use of systemic drugs in the treatment of skin diseases

Systemic drugs are used in the treatment of several skin diseases. In order to obtain best therapeutic results and prevent side effects, the patients should be carefully screened before and thoroughly evaluated during treatment. In this article guidelines for selection and follow up of patients receiving systemic drugs for their skin diseases are presented. These drugs include azathioprine, ant...

Compliance to HIV treatment monitoring guidelines can reduce laboratory costs

Background Panel tests are a predetermined group of tests commonly requested together to provide a comprehensive and conclusive diagnosis, for example, liver function test (LFT). South African HIV antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines recommend individual tests for toxicity monitoring over panel tests. In 2008, the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) request form was redesigned to li...

A Review on Therapeutic Drug Monitoring of Immunosuppressant Drugs

Immunosuppressants require therapeutic drug monitoring because of their narrow therapeutic index and significant inter-individual variability in blood concentrations. This variability can be because of factors like drug-nutrient interactions, drug-disease interactions, renal-insufficiency, inflammation and infection, gender, age, polymorphism and liver mass. Drug monitoring is widely practiced ...

Antimicrobial drugs for treating cholera

BACKGROUND Cholera is an acute watery diarrhoea caused by infection with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which if severe can cause rapid dehydration and death. Effective management requires early diagnosis and rehydration using oral rehydration salts or intravenous fluids. In this review, we evaluate the additional benefits of treating cholera with antimicrobial drugs. OBJECTIVES To quantify t...