A study was carried out to assess the feasibility of using record linkage for drug monitoring. For two years, three types of records were collected for a total of 43 117 people: (1) details of basic attributes, such as sex and age; (2) details of prescriptions dispensed; and (3) records of hospital admissions, obstetric deliveries, and deaths. The records about each person were linked together,...

Treatment of patients with epilepsy strives for complete seizure control without intolerable drug side effects. Independent of blood drug levels, toxic effects allow titration to efficacy; however, allergic reactions, metabolically or genetically determined drug-induced illnesses, and idiosyncratic effects of drugs, while rare, may be life-threatening.Monitoring is an attempt to detect serious ...

In this issue of the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia, Martins et al. (1) are publishing an interesting review, a meta-analysis, of the clinical and analytical aspects of therapeutic drug monitoring of imatinib in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Imatinib, the archetype for tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapeutics, is an excellent example of intelligent drug development accompanied ...

Concerns about increasing bacterial resistance to vancomycin, have caused the adult treatment guidelines to recommend higher trough concentrations based on the type and location of infectious disease. Although these recommendations are not specific to children, the values can be extrapolated. This prospective study was designed to evaluate efficacy of current vancomycin dosing recommendations t...

Sirolimus is a potent immunosuppressive agent administered as prophylactic agent to prevent rejection after organ transplantation. Sirolimus must be used within a narrow therapeutic window. Due to inter- and intra-variability, sirolimus blood concentrations may be affected, therefore, there is no possibility of predicting the sirolimus blood concentrations based on the dose patients received. T...

voriconazole is an antifungal triazole, approved for management of invasive fungal diseases in patients. it is absorbed during two hours and its serum levels will be above 90%, based on the underlying factors, when the drug is administered orally. voriconazole shows a propotional increase in an area under the plasma concentration-time curve (auc), with increasing dose. plasma protein binding of...

Efficacy of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of vancomycin (VCM) was retrospectively investigated in 184 patients with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. The incidence of nephrotoxicity was compared between the patients who received TDM practice (TDM group, n=73) and did not (non-TDM group, n=111). Creatinine clearance (CLcr) values decreased significantly after the ...

PURPOSE Gabapentin and pregabalin are antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) with epilepsy and neuropathic pain indications. The purpose of this study was to investigate pharmacokinetic variability of gabapentin and pregabalin and indications for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) in clinical practice with focus on gender aspects. METHOD Anonymous data from routine TDM-service at the National Center for E...

PURPOSE Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in serum is frequently used in clinical settings however saliva could be an alternative to measure free concentration of drugs. In the present study, we observed the possible correlation of VPA concentration between serum and saliva in persons with epilepsy (PWE). METHODS A total of 59 paired serum and saliva samples were...

We evaluated the usefulness of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) for gentamicin and the use of a two-point peak and trough pair concentration method to adjust its dose. Of the 194 patients included, initial concentrations were appropriate in only sixty nine. In the seventy one cases of dosage adjustments using this method, those attaining therapeutic levels increased overall from 38% to 67%. It...