This guide is not a dictionary of pharmacological agents. It is a practical manual intended for health professionals, physicians, phamacists, nurses and health auxiliaries involved in curative care and drug management.
All the formulations were developed exclusively on a laboratory scale of the order of 1 kg maximum. For this reason, scale-up for production must therefore be checked and revised, as necessary. It is only in very exceptional cases that the formulations have been optimized by a systematic study involving a comparison between different excipients or by varying the amounts of excipients. Thus, the…
Everybody thinks it cannot happen to them. And yet, six million people die of cancer every year. Approximately every fourth citizen of a developed country will be stricken sometime during his life and approximately 400 new incidents emerge per 100,000 people annually. Once considered a mysterious disease, cancer has been eventually revealed to investigators (Trichopoulos and Hunter, 1996). Dise…
Davis’s Pocket Clinical Drug Reference is a quick resource for the most commonly used drugs in clinical practice. The monographs are designed to highlight pertinent information; specifically, each monograph includes a drug’s generic name, brand name, therapeutic indication, pharmacologic class, pregnancy class, contraindications, adverse drug reactions, drug interactions, dose, availability…
A recent article published in the New York Times quoted the astounding statistic that as many as 7,000–10,000 deaths in the United States can be attributed on an annual basis to prescription errors. Countless hospital days, loss of productivity, and an atmosphere of distrust of modern medicine all result from such errors. Many causes can be found for these mistakes; drugs with completely diff…
Today, computers are so ubiquitous in pharmaceutical research and development that it may be hard to imagine a time when there were no computers to assist the medicinal chemist or biologist. A quarter-century ago, the notion of a computer on the desk of every scientist and company manager was not even contemplated. Now, computers are absolutely essential for generating, managing, and transmitti…
The administration of one drug (A) can alter the action of another (B) by one of two general mechanisms: • Modification of the pharmacological effect of B without altering its concentration in the tissue fluid (pharmacodynamic interaction) • Alteration of the concentration of B that reaches its site of action (pharmacokinetic interaction). 1) For such interactions to be important clinically…