Judging from the title, most of you would be scared seeing such a big, large scientific word. Not to worry, this word is important in our modern world, and I am here to break it down quickly for you. Pharmacodynamics is essentially the study of the effects a drug would incur on a being and what response it would trigger. This branch of overarching biochemistry is important as in modern chemistry is of great use in fields, like Forensic Chemistry.
The main essence that makes up pharmacodynamics is a concept known as dose-response relationships which highlight the relationship between the drug concentration and the resulting effect generated.
L + R ⇌ LR
In this equation shown above, L stands for ligand, which is a fancy word for drug, R stands for receptor (the target), and LR stands for ligand-receptor complex concentrations.
This article highly emphasises dose-response relationships due to their practical applications in modern Pharma dynamics and biochemistry. These models are developed to determine the beneficial levels of dosage for drugs and pollutants one is exposed to. In forensic science, this is used to determine whether victims were under the influence of drugs.
Fig 2 shows how the response is measured depending on the drug concentration.
The graph contains two steep 'plateaus' known in graph terminology. The stationary line from -7 to -6 (which indicates the amount of drug) shows that too little dosage is insufficient for a great response from the body whereas high dosages such as -4.5 to -4 show that they are too overwhelming for the patient. The goldilocks zone to create a balanced response would lie between -5.5 to 5. This is important, as in aspects such as criminology, dose-response relationships can be manipulated to conclude what drug someone has overdosed on by comparing it to other substances.
Clinicians use the given information from PK and PD analysis to treat different patients such as the elderly and those with problems related to organs such as the liver or kidneys. Pharmacodynamics is a common name in forensic pharmacology where it is used to detect drugs for legal and medical purposes. Their main application is to determine the cause of death, the drug response, the time it happened, and how long it was present. Based on most studies, this is prevalent in cases of drug overdoses or sudden deaths, where factors such as toxins and poisons draw the attention of pharmacodynamics.
Well, this article may or may not have drawn your attention to one of the more obscure branches of the great "biochemistry god tree". In all essence, this relies on basic concepts taught in Chemistry class, i.e.: rate of reactions, reversible reactions, etc. This topic is interesting and would require some more reading. I hope you depart with more knowledge about Chemistry!
- Ishaan Raghav
Bibliography
Fig 1 Source:
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