#Loading dose free#

#Loading dose free#

There are also decent articles by Williams (1992) and Thompson (1992) Neither is available as free text, and so one would need to engage in some level of institutional access whoring or some sort of darkweb shenanigans to get hold of them.

One could do worse than the 1982 Dosage regimen designby DeVane and Jusko. However, in the spirit of encouraging bad behaviour, some alternative peer-reviewed resources can be suggested. This is probably a waste of time if it is happening on the night before the exam. All of this is offered below.Įven though Birkett's 1996 article for the Australian Prescriber is virtually identical to the 2009 book chapter (and is available for free), one might still for some reason want to read other things. Loading dose = desired peak concentration (mg/L) × volume of distribution (L)įor drugs not given IV, these doses need to be divided by the bioavailability.Īpart from equations, 'points were awarded for explaining the rationale for giving a loading dose and for relevant diagrams', as well as examples of drugs.Maintenance dose rate (mg/hr) = desired peak concentration (mg/L) × clearance (L/hr).Dose rate (mg/hr) = dose (mg) divided by dosing interval (hrs).The pass rate was 30% 'main points for a pass included the equations for determining the loading and maintenance doses.' To address this injustice, this chapter will present those equations up front before degenerating into characteristic gibberish. It therefore seemed all the more unfair when Question 10 from the first paper of 2009 asked the candidates to 'describe the calculations involved in determining the loading dose and maintenance dose for an intravenous infusion'. However, neither the new 2017 syllabus nor the old 2014 syllabus included anything specific about dose calculations in their list of learning objectives or expected abilities. Loading doses and maintenance doses have some practical relevance to these concepts, and the design of a dosing regimen requires some understanding of them. This chapter is vaguely relevant to parts from Section B(v) of the 2017 CICM Primary Syllabus, which expects the exam candidate to ' explain the concepts of intravenous bolus and infusion kinetics'.