Clinical pharmacokinetics worksheet with answers

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A patient who weighs 78 kg needs a loading dose of gentamicin to reach a level of 10 mg/L straight away. The volume of distribution is 0.25 L/kg. Find the loading dose LD in mg.

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A patient who weighs 58 kg needs a loading dose of gentamicin to reach a level of 6 mg/L straight away. The volume of distribution is 0.25 L/kg. Find the loading dose LD in mg.

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A patient receives an IV bolus of 90 mg of gentamicin. The level back-extrapolated to time zero is 6 mg/L and the half-life is 3 h. Find the volume of distribution Vd.

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A 100 kg patient is to be loaded intravenously with phenytoin sodium to reach a phenytoin level of 15 mg/L. The volume of distribution is 0.7 L/kg and the salt factor is S = 0.92. Find the loading dose LD of phenytoin sodium in mg.

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A patient's tobramycin half-life is 3.5 h. The target is a peak of 7 mg/L and a trough of 1 mg/L. Assuming rapid IV doses and first-order elimination, what dosing interval τ lets the level fall from the peak to the trough? Round to one decimal place.

Practice exercise (made-up values, not clinical guidance). A 43-year-old man weighs 81 kg and has a serum creatinine of 2.5 mg/dL (221 µmol/L). Estimate the creatinine clearance with Cockcroft–Gault: CrCl (mL/min) = (140 − age) × weight (kg)/(72 × SCr in mg/dL), × 0.85 for women. The usual vancomycin regimen is 1000 mg every 12 h for a creatinine clearance of 120 mL/min. Keeping the dose, the interval is lengthened in proportion to the fall in clearance. Find the new dosing interval τ. Round to one decimal place.