Dose estimation for children.

There is a wide perception that the paediatric population has been badly served by pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators and governmental funding bodies, in that too little resource has been committed to developing effective and safe medicines for children, and in particular defining the right dose(s) for appropriate paediatric populations (see for example reference [1]). Paediatricians, clinical pharmacologists and clinical pharmacists have for many years struggled to make the best use of information available to them, as evidenced by local paediatric formularies, and, more recently, the formulary published by the Medicines Committee of the Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group [2]. This review explores three areas of this problem: