Foundations of Pharmacokinetics

This book has its origin in my experience as a teacher of pharmacokinetics in many universities in four different continents. Chapters 13 to 17 show how different parameters of importance in pharmacokinetics can be exactly defined and measured. This title is divided into two parts. In the first part, the principles and the methods of pharmacokinetics are described in detail, while in the second the main pharmacokinetic parameters are described, giving for each of them the definition, the principal properties, and the methods of determination. An appendix contains the important mathematical instruments used in the main part of the book, namely the operational calculus and the convolution integral. The first part begins with the definition of pharmacokinetics, then continues with the description of the experimental method as applied to the modelling of pharmacokinetic systems. The bulk of this part is the description of the first compartmental models used in the 1930s, the more modern compartmental equations developed later, the integral equations and the matrix equations. In the second part there is a careful distinction among pharmacokinetic parameters, that is, parameters that represent a true pharmacokinetic property, model parameters, that is, parameters that represent a property of a specific model, and incidental parameters, that is, parameters that represent only the result of a particular experiment. Special care is taken to distinguish between the definition of a parameter, and the properties that derive from that definition; a considerable emphasis is also given to the fact that each method for the determination of a parameter is dependent on the specific model it is based on.