7.2: Therapeutic index

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Therapeutic index

The therapeutic index (TI; also referred to as therapeutic ratio) is a quantitative measurement of the relative safety of a drug. It is a comparison of the amount of a therapeutic agent that causes the therapeutic effect to the amount that causes toxicity.

TI is determined in animals as the lethal dose of a drug for 50% of the population (LD₅₀) divided by the minimum effective dose for 50% of the population (ED₅₀):

Therapeutic Index (TI) = LD₅₀/ ED₅₀

A higher therapeutic index is preferable to a lower one: a patient would have to take a much higher dose of such a drug to reach the toxic threshold than the dose taken to elicit the therapeutic effect.

Therapeutic index.png

The related terms therapeutic window or safety window refer to a range of doses which optimize between efficacy and toxicity, achieving the greatest therapeutic benefit without resulting in unacceptable side-effects or toxicity.

Range of therapeutic indices

The therapeutic index varies widely among substances, even within a related group.

For instance, the opioid painkiller remifentanil is very forgiving, offering a therapeutic index of 33,000:1, while Diazepam, a benzodiazepine sedative-hypnotic and skeletal muscle relaxant, has a less forgiving therapeutic index of 100:1. Morphine is even less so with a therapeutic index of 70.

Sources

Therapeutic index from Wikipedia Commons. Under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License