healthcare thinking 19

"Imagine a drug regimen where an obese person would cycle between different drug therapies over the course of a month to achieve a greater degree of body weight loss compared to the effects achieved with either a single drug or the continuous combination of drugs," said senior author Dr. Matthew Hayes. His team studied the combination of two different drug classes that target different hormones: amylin and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). They found that combined treatments acted synergistically to suppress feeding and body weight. They also discovered that the weight loss effects of chronic amylin- and GLP-1-based combination  therapies could be enhanced when obese lab animals are cycled through their drug treatments. "The idea of drug-cycling is nothing new," says lead author Kieran Koch-Laskowski. "Millions of women on birth control pills, for example, already take daily pills that cycle between drug and placebo throughout the month," she goes on to ...

Medicines can have different effects on different people. The effects in children can vary due to changes that take place as they grow and develop. Historically, there has been very little focus on paediatric clinical pharmacology , and there are still a lot of unknowns with regard to optimally delivering medicines to children. In many paediatric populations worldwide the proportion of children who are overweight and obese is increasing, but there is wide geographical variation (from 16.9% in the USA to 0.5% in Denmark). The dosage of many children's drugs is based on total body weight (TBW) unfortunately obesity can cause problems establishing the best dose. Reservoirs After a drug is absorbed into the bloodstream , it rapidly circulates through the body. As the blood recirculates, the drug moves from the bloodstream into the body's tissues. Once absorbed, most drugs do not spread evenly throughout the body. Drugs that dissolve in water (water-soluble drugs) tend t...