The Importance Of Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is the clinical practice of measuring specific drugs at timed intervals in order to maintain a relatively constant concentration in a patient's bloodstream, thereby optimizing individual dosage regimens. It is not necessary to use therapeutic drug monitoring for all the of medications, and it is used mainly for monitoring drugs with some narrow therapeutic ranges, drugs with marked variability in pharmacokinetic, medications with target concentrations which are difficult to monitor, and drugs that are known to cause therapeutic and adverse effects. The process of therapeutic drug monitoring is based on the assumption that there is a specific relationship between dose and plasma or blood drug concentration, and between concentration and therapeutic effects. Therapeutic drug

When interpreting concentration measurements, factors that need to be considered include the sampling time in relation to drug dose, dosage history, patient response, and the desired medicinal targets. The goal of therapeutic drug monitoring is to use suitable concentrations of difficult-to-manage medications to optimize clinical outcomes in patients in various clinical situations.
Keywords: Drug monitoring, therapeutic; Pharmacokinetics Introduction

Therapeutic drug monitoring is generally defined as the measurement of specific drugs at timed intervals in order to maintain a relatively constant concentration of the medication in the bloodstream. Monitored drugs tend to have a narrow therapeutic index, that is a ratio between the toxic and therapeutic doses of medications. For some other