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Adjuvant
In pharmacology, an adjuvant is a drug or other substance, or a combination of substances, that is used to increase the efficacy or potency of certain drugs. Specifically, the term can refer to: * Adjuvant therapy in cancer management * Analgesic adjuvant in pain management * Immunologic adjuvant In immunology, an adjuvant is a substance that increases or modulates the immune response to a vaccine. The word "adjuvant" comes from the Latin word , meaning to help or aid. "An immunologic adjuvant is defined as any substance that acts to acce ... in vaccines {{sia Adjuvants ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adjuvant Therapy
Adjuvant therapy, also known as adjunct therapy, adjuvant care, or augmentation therapy, is a therapy that is given in addition to the primary or initial therapy to maximize its effectiveness. The surgeries and complex treatment regimens used in cancer therapy have led the term to be used mainly to describe adjuvant cancer treatments. An example of such adjuvant therapy is the additional treatment usually given after surgery where all detectable disease has been removed, but where there remains a statistical risk of relapse due to the presence of undetected disease. If known disease is left behind following surgery, then further treatment is not technically adjuvant. An adjuvant used on its own specifically refers to an agent that improves the effect of a vaccine. Medications used to help primary medications are known as add-ons. History The term "adjuvant therapy," derived from the Latin term ''adjuvÄre'', meaning "to help," was first coined by Paul Carbone and his team at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Immunologic Adjuvant
In immunology, an adjuvant is a substance that increases or modulates the immune response to a vaccine. The word "adjuvant" comes from the Latin word , meaning to help or aid. "An immunologic adjuvant is defined as any substance that acts to accelerate, prolong, or enhance antigen-specific immune responses when used in combination with specific vaccine antigens." In the early days of vaccine manufacture, significant variations in the efficacy of different batches of the same vaccine were correctly assumed to be caused by contamination of the reaction vessels. However, it was soon found that more scrupulous cleaning actually seemed to ''reduce'' the effectiveness of the vaccines, and some contaminants actually enhanced the immune response. There are many known adjuvants in widespread use, including potassium alum, various plant and animal derived oils and virosomes. Overview Adjuvants in immunology are often used to modify or augment the effects of a vaccine by stimulating the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analgesic Adjuvant
An analgesic adjuvant is a medication that is typically used for indications other than pain control but provides control of pain (analgesia) in some painful diseases. This is often part of multimodal analgesia, where one of the intentions is to minimize the need for opioids. Rationale Multimodal analgesia refers to the use of multiple classes of medications in order to treat pain from different molecular mechanisms at once. Prolonged use of higher doses of opioids is associated with increased risk of tolerance and opioid use disorder, so there is a growing trend in the use of multimodal analgesia to treat pain. Types Anticonvulsants Anticonvulsants work through blockade of sodium and calcium ion channels to reduce glutamate (excitatory neurotransmitter) release. Nociceptor hyper-excitability, due to damage to pain-transmitting neurons, results in chronic neuropathic pain. Common anticonvulsants used to treat neuropathy are gabapentinoids (calcium channel blockers) and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pharmacology
Pharmacology is the science of drugs and medications, including a substance's origin, composition, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, therapeutic use, and toxicology. More specifically, it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals. The field encompasses drug composition and properties, functions, sources, synthesis and drug design, molecular and cellular mechanisms, organ/systems mechanisms, signal transduction/cellular communication, molecular diagnostics, interactions, chemical biology, therapy, and medical applications and antipathogenic capabilities. The two main areas of pharmacology are pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. Pharmacodynamics studies the effects of a drug on biological systems, and pharmacokinetics studies the effects of biological systems on a drug. In broad terms, pharmacod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Efficacy
Efficacy is the ability to perform a task to a satisfactory or expected degree. The word comes from the same roots as '' effectiveness'', and it has often been used synonymously, although in pharmacology a distinction is now often made between efficacy and effectiveness. The word ''efficacy'' is used in pharmacology and medicine to refer both to the maximum response achievable from a pharmaceutical drug in research settings, and to the capacity for sufficient therapeutic effect or beneficial change in clinical settings. Pharmacology In pharmacology, efficacy () is the maximum response achievable from an applied or dosed agent, for instance, a small molecule drug. Intrinsic activity is a relative term for a drug's efficacy relative to a drug with the highest observed efficacy. It is a purely descriptive term that has little or no mechanistic interpretation. In order for a drug to have an effect, it needs to bind to its target, and then to affect the function of this tar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Potency (pharmacology)
In pharmacology, potency or biological potency is a measure of a drug's biological activity expressed in terms of the dose required to produce a pharmacological effect of given intensity. A highly potent drug (e.g., fentanyl, clonazepam, risperidone, benperidol, bumetanide) evokes a given response at low concentrations, while a drug of lower potency (e.g. morphine, alprazolam, ziprasidone, haloperidol, furosemide) evokes the same response only at higher concentrations. Higher potency does not necessarily mean greater effectiveness nor more side effects nor less side effects. Types of potency The International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) has stated that "potency is an imprecise term that should always be further defined", and lists of types of potency as follows: Miscellaneous Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is one of the most potent psychoactive drug A psychoactive drug, psychopharmaceutical, mind-altering drug, consciousness-altering drug, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
