Description

This insightful work provides a useful introduction to the very large and important field of pharmacokinetics. The authors have selected the Time Constant Approach as a unifying view within which to present important application areas. In addition to providing consistency, their approach provides the novice with an intuitive time view that is meaningful from the outset. This approach allows one to get a "feel" for the data and to relate it to other data in a direct and accessible manner.

The Time Constant Approach provides a synthesis of the noncompartmental and compartmental methods, with the advantages of both. It starts by defining a physiologically meaningful model based on the pharmacokinetic processes involved. The Time Constant Approach recognizes pharmacokinetics as a number of processes that move drugs between physiological compartments, each process occurring at its own characteristic length of time, to correlate descriptive pharmacokinetic events with time constants of pharmacokinetic processes. While analogous to the three most common testing approaches for pharmacokinetics (the noncompartmental, compartmental and statistical moment approaches) the Time Constant Approach possesses many advantages.