Kinetics of drug effect by distributed lags analysis: An application to cocaine

Abstract

The same plasma drug concentration may induce different effects depending on whether the concentration is rising or falling. A new method of modeling kinetics of drug effects that can handle such dissociation phenomena, that does not depend on compartmental theory, and that allows quantitative comparisons between experiments is described. As applied to cocaine, the resulting models are independent of drug dose or route of administration and give good predictions of the time course of response.