Applied and Clinical Pharmacology

Principles of drug dosing in patients with hepatic insufficiency

In this lesson, we will build on last week's topic - antiepileptic drugs (or anticonvulsants if you prefer) - which are a common cause of liver injury and, at the same time, they are drugs with a narrow therapeutic window, thus sensitive to changes associated with liver function impairment. However, the etiology of hepatic insufficiency is broad, and anticonvulsants are certainly not solely to blame. Therefore, we will now address the issues of drug-induced liver injury and the complicated topic of principles of drug dosing in patients with hepatic insufficiency.

Join us in first looking at the principles of dose adjustment in hepatic insufficiency - read the relevant chapter of the pre-class reading (chapter 5 of the book):

In the last part of the above chapter, we mention that the issues of treatment of symptoms typical of liver impairment and drug-induced liver injury will be discussed in the lecture. 

Please listen to both video lectures. Each of them is approximately 20 minutes long. The handouts for the video lectures can be found below.

Handouts for the video lectures can be found here:

Test your knowledge after reading the pre-class reading chapters and listening to the complementary lectures. 

Try taking the ROPOT test here:

And now you can look forward to the TBL lesson where we will focus on therapy in virtual patient with liver dysfunction.