As a result of changes in healthcare delivery, patients are increasingly receiving medical treatment in the home and community setting, instead of as inpatients in a hospital. Patients receiving prolonged parenteral antibiotic therapy are among potential suitable candidates to continue treatment outside the hospital setting. However, outpatient management of these individuals, particularly thos...

Posaconazole has become an important part of the antifungal armamentarium in the prophylaxis and salvage treatment of invasive fungal infections (IFIs). Structurally related to itraconazole, posaconazole displays low oral bioavailability due to poor solubility, with significant drug interactions and gastrointestinal disease also contributing to the generally low posaconazole plasma concentratio...

Slow responders to tuberculosis (TB) treatment in Virginia have prolonged treatment duration and consume more programmatic resources. Diabetes is an independent risk factor for slow response and low serum anti-TB drug concentrations. Thus, a statewide initiative of early therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) for isoniazid and rifampin at 2 weeks after TB treatment was piloted for all diabetics with...

Traditional antibiotic dosing was not designed for today's escalating antibiotic resistance, lack of novel antibiotics and growing complexity in patient populations. Dosing that ensures optimal antibiotic exposures should be considered essential to increase the likelihood of effective patient treatment. Given the variability in these exposures across different patients, a 'one-dose-fits-all' ap...

OBJECTIVE Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) enables individualization in the treatment to optimize clinical benefit and minimize drugs' side effects. Critically ill septic patients represent a challenge for antimicrobial treatment because of pathophysiological impact of sepsis on pharmacokinetics of drugs. The aim of this study was to assess the appropriateness of gentamicin and amikacin dosing...

BACKGROUND Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) for lithium is recommended in guidelines; however, the prevalence of TDM for lithium is seldom reported. We have therefore investigated the prevalence of TDM for lithium and evaluated the impact of the regulatory warnings requiring routine TDM for lithium. METHODS Monthly claims data covering around 1.7 million persons aged 20-74 years old during t...

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 ...

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of immunosuppressive drugs has evolved over the last few decades. The use of liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, for example, now provides robust and highly specific quantification in the clinical laboratory. Nevertheless, the measurement of immunosuppressive drug concentrations, even if carried out accurately and precisely, does not sufficiently re...