Clinical significance of enzyme induction and inhibition

Published on October 1, 2007 Updated on July 27, 2016   33 min

A selection of talks on Metabolism & Nutrition

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0:00
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kim Brosen. I'm a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark. I'm going to talk to you about the clinical significance of enzyme induction and inhibition.
0:17
There is a Danish cartoon made by a Danish cartoonist called Robert Storm Petersen. It shows a physician who hands a prescription to a patient and says to the patient, "If this drug doesn't help, then come back, and I can prescribe you something else." And then the patient says: "Why don't I get something else right away?" And what we're going to talk about today is related to this everyday clinical situation that the outcome of a treatment is unpredictable because patients are different.
0:49
Patients are different both in their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics because there are different host factors that influence the actions of drugs. Patients live in different environments. And patients are genetically different. And these three domains certainly also influence differences in drug metabolism.
1:11
Drug-drug interactions are something that can occur when two or more drugs are given concomitantly. And what it means is that one perpetrator drug changes the effect of another victim drug in a way which is not beneficial to the patient.
1:28
Usually, drugs are developed and made in such a way that the likelihood of giving interactions with other drugs is minimized. So therefore, it's quite common in clinical practice that drugs can be combined without any drug-drug interactions. Or there can be clinically unimportant drug interaction. It's rather unusual that there are clinically important drug interactions, which can be coped with by adjusting the dose or changing the dose regimen. And very rarely, drug-drug interaction is so dangerous that two drugs cannot be combined.
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Clinical significance of enzyme induction and inhibition

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