Imagine a doctor telling you she is deliberately prescribing an excessive dose of a drug because she prescribed too weak a dose the last time.
This may have resulted in the drug's dose being much higher than was needed to make sure it was effective.
Second, the only way to really know which drug or which dose is right for a given patient is to conduct a clinical trial that compares drugs or doses to each other or against a placebo.
To pull out the most relevant number from that: the decline in distance walked among patients treated with a high dose of the drug was about a tenth as much as for those who were on the low dose.
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The labeling for AstraZeneca's cholesterol drug Crestor suggests starting the drug at a lower dose in Asians.
These patients are not going to get this drug at the current dose.
Tularik was so concerned about safety that in phase-II trials for liver cancer, it tried the drug at a lower dose than it otherwise might have.
In addition, the FDA recommends that all patients taking Qsymia have their heart rate monitored regularly, in particular when starting the drug or increasing the dose.
According to briefing documents available on the FDA's Web site, sound-alike and look-alike names are a common cause of medicine errors--when patients receive the wrong drug or the wrong dose.
Currently, the FDA awards only three years of exclusivity if a fixed-dose combination drug contains a previously approved ingredient, and if a drugmaker conducted new clinical studies that were essential to approval.
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But the Prometheus patent is different, the appeals court said, because in the former case the doctor is passively calculating results while under the Prometheus process the doctor has to administer a drug then adjust the dose based on how the patient responds.
The big debate about the drug is whether lowering cholesterol with Zetia is as good as using a higher dose of a statin drug like Lipitor, Zocor or AstraZeneca (nyse: AZN - news - people )'s Crestor.
To make things worse, the high, 80-milligram dose of the drug will probably not make it to pharmacy shelves.
In the circadian-gene mutants, however, the enzyme's activity stays steady after a dose of the drug, so tyramine levels remain low.
During the trial, Dr Murray's lawyers argued that Jackson self-administered a lethal dose of the drug while he was out of the room.
This time the agency asked for a new study to test the effect of a high dose of the drug on heart rhythm.
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There have been widespread concerns that if a patient stops taking the drug suddenly - or changes dose - they are vulnerable to suicidal feelings.
The company said it couldn't confirm that amount, and that a dose of the drug varies depending on such factors as a patient's weight and severity of bleeding.
From then the Mirapex patients continued to take a fixed dose of the drug, while levadopa was given to all patients in differing doses depending on their symptoms.
The new Crestor label also contains a boldfaced instruction not to prescribe the highest dose of the drug (40 milligrams) unless patients have not been sufficiently helped by lower doses.
But rotigotine has a distinct advantage: It's the first dopamine agonist to be delivered via a patch, thereby allowing patients to have a consistent dose of the drug in their systems at all times.
Prometheus has a patent on a method for administering the proper dose of a drug by first administering a little, then checking the amount in the patient, and then deciding whether to administer more.
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It seemed to show that a lower dose of the drug could work just as well as a higher one in lung cancer, says Roman Perez-Solar of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Most importantly, the order said, examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office determined that the information at issue was irrelevant to patentability, saying it dealt with tests of the median lethal dose of the drug, not the much lower doses used by consumers.
Although the blockbuster antibiotic Zithromax is losing patent protection, Pfizer plans to launch a single-dose version of the drug.
These patients should either discontinue the drug or move to the higher dose.
Then, they seek FDA approval of a fixed-dose combination including that drug.
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Of course, the market may like the softer side of GDP, as it likely ensures another dose of the liquidity drug from the money czar, Bernanke, the king of money printing.
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After six weeks in hospital and a life-saving dose of a new drug - penicillin - Mr Taylor was sent back to the colliery where he stayed until after the war ended.
In the trial, Lipitor clearly bested the second-highest dose of a competing drug made by Bristol-Myers Squibb (nyse: BMY - news - people ), which did not stop the buildup of cholesterol plaque.
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