Obesity and Allometric Scaling of Pharmacokinetics

Excerpt

Obesity is a widely used term, but may mean different things to different people — in the minds of some people, an obese person is someone heavier than themselves. In the medical literature, an arbitrary cut-off is used to define obesity, such as a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30 kg/m², but these definitions often lack a sound scientific foundation. Also, as is discussed below, the BMI is a very indirect descriptor of body composition. For the purposes of this article, we define obesity as the accumulation of excess body fat to an extent that it may have a negative impact on health and life expectancy. It is thought to be one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century, because of the adverse consequences for individual health and because its prevalence is increasing across all sectors of the population. Aside from the well known health consequences, obesity has significant consequences for pharmacokinetics[1] and pharmacodynamics as well. Rational drug therapy requires knowledge of these relationships so that adequate drug doses can be determined for obese and non-obese patients. …