Pharmacology 2060A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Pharmacotherapy, Messenger Rna, Glucose Transporter
27 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Pharmacodynamics is the study of what the drug does to the body. In pharmacodynamics we study the biomechanical and physiological effects of drugs and the mechanisms by which drugs produce effects. In therapeutics it is important to combine knowledge of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in order to provide optimal pharmacotherapy. In the pharmacokinetics section you learned that increasing the dose of a drug results in increased plasma concentrations. In pharmacodynamics you will see that increasing the dose increases the response to the drug. To evaluate the pharmacodynamics of drugs, we look at dose-response curves. Dose-response curves are monotonic, which means that the response increases as the dose increases. For this reason we usually look at the dose response curve as a semi- logarithmic plot. Phases of the semi- logarithmic dose- response curve. Phase 1- doses are too low to elicit a clinically relevant response. Phase 2- the response is graded and nearly linear.
