Abstract: Abstract Drugs and other exogenous substances may be viewed as agents that exert characteristic effects on cells and tissues, but they may also be regarded as agents on which individuals exert important differential effects. To develop explanatory and predictive insights relevant to pharmacogenetics, pharmacologists are more likely to view the effects of a specific drug from the former perspective, while geneticists are more likely to see them from the latter. From a pharmacological viewpoint, individual responsiveness depends on the intrinsic properties of the drug at hand and can be analyzed from observations of its pharmacokinetic and the pharmacodynamic properties. Often the plasma drug concentration or pattern of drug metabolites correlates with an unusual therapeutic effect or an adverse drug reaction, and observations of parameters such as peak and steady-state levels of the drug in plasma, half-lives of drugs in plasma, the ratio of parent drug to metabolite, or the urinary pattern of drug metabolites are successfully employed to study the doseresponse and dynamics of the response.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-02
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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