That can't only have been a week. I am already mentally and even physically exhausted. Yay med school!
One of the more counterintuitive concepts we've learned so far in pharmacology is that the urine excretion percentage of an unaltered drug is actually proportional to the bioavailability of the drug. Put more simply, the more of a raw drug you pee out, the more of it you probably were able to use.
For example, if you give two drugs and find a ton of one in the person's urine, you would generally assume that that one was used less than the one that isn't showing up in the urine. But actually, if only a little of the drug comes out in someone's urine, then it was probably quickly and heavily metabolized (and inactivated). The inactive products of that metabolism would then be peed out on their own. The presence of lots of intact drug in the urine means the drug was probably available for use while in the circulation.
TIL: One of the reasons you shouldn't take Tylenol with alcohol is that alcohol activates a little-used metabolism pathway for Tylenol that produces a potent toxin.
No comments:
Post a Comment