Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

The science of drug discovery has come a long way,which began with administrations of drugs in crude,bitter and unpalatable forms, to high levels of sophistication.the discoveries like aspirin sulphonamides have revolutionised allopathic system of medicine in the last century,The new millennium has taken further leap in this direction.
Today the latest concept in medicine is towards individualization of treatment.We are aware of the fact that,the animal studies extended to humans or in-vitro experiments extended to humans may not produce the same clinical responses.Similarly when two formulations are given to two different individuals with the same disease, they may not produce the same results in the form of pharmacological actions and responses .In such situations,the management of drug therapy its dosage regimen design play an important role.The drugs with specially narrow margin of safety carry the risk of toxicity with them and pose problems.Every individual is a unique creation with his/her own identity like mental ability,life style, unique functional status of vital organs,the stress and strain experienced, which play a role in in eliciting the drug responses apart from the well established theories of geographic, demographic variations of pharmacokinetic, physicochemical and , physiological factors.This is where the principles of pharmacokinetics and therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) begins