In the past twenty years, 14 new antiepileptic drugs have been approved for use in the United States and/or Europe. These drugs are eslicarbazepine acetate, felbamate, gabapentin, lacosamide, lamotrigine, levetiracetam, oxcarbazepine, pregabalin, rufinamide, stiripentol, tiagabine, topiramate, vigabatrin and zonisamide. In general, the clinical utility of therapeutic drug monitoring has not bee...

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...

Although tuberculosis is largely a curable disease, it remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although the standard 6-month treatment regimen is highly effective for drug-susceptible tuberculosis, the use of multiple drugs over long periods of time can cause frequent adverse drug reactions. In addition, some patients with drug-susceptible tuberculosis do not respond adequat...

OBJECTIVES To examine the association of risk factors, age, gender, and earlier opioid requirement with the rate of dose escalation in long-term opioid therapy. METHODS This is a retrospective cohort study of 1,922 individuals identified from California's prescription drug monitoring program database who continuously used opioids from 1999 to 2007. A linear mixed-effects model was used to exa...

the aim of this study was evaluation of enoxaparin utilization in hospitalized patients who had received enoxaparin either for prophylaxis or for treatment of thromboembolic disorders. a total of 356 patients were included in this retrospective study and were analyzed for enoxaparin utilization in terms of prescription patterns, treatment strategy, dosing regimen, indications/contraindications,...