Online Canadian Pharmacy Blog

Archive for the 'Canadian health care mall' Category...

Filed under Canadian health care mall, Psychotherapy

Drugs used in bipolar disorder: lithium. Very good for mania but also very effective in treating depression in bipolar patients. Hard to tolerate the effects of GI, alopecia, weight gain, ataxia, acne, polyuria, polydipsia. It takes a while to work, unlike Depakote which you can kind of load the person up. Classically considered to cause cardiac malformations, Ebstein’s anomaly. That was sort of a classic thing. What happens if you give a pregnant woman this drug, what do you get? What happens if you give a pregnant woman lithium? Ebstein’s anomaly. What about Tegretol? Probably craniofacial. That’s what I would answer on Boards. What about cheap Depakote online, valproic acid? Probably neural tube. That’s what I would answer. They need periodic blood monitoring. Cardiac affects of lithium requires EKG monitoring. T-wave inversion, a lot of side effects. Neuro-therapeutic index: remember what therapeutic index is? Here’s how much it takes to kill 50 rats and here’s how much it takes to treat 50 rats. You give 100 rats this drug and at what point do you get the LD 50 where they die? Really what you want is a very wide therapeutic index. In other words, it only takes 10 mg to treat you but it takes 10,000 mg to overdose you. Lithium is not that way, it’s very narrow. It takes this much to treat you but a little bit more can cause side effects and sometimes even death. Very toxic. You can get elevated lithium levels with some diuretics, with diminished salt intake and with NSAID’s. Can get decreased lithium levels with excessive caffeine intake. Somebody is on a psychiatric unit, they are drinking four pots of coffee before they come in, or two pots of coffee a day before they come in. Suddenly they come onto your non-caffeinated psychiatric unit. What happens? Their lithium level goes up because they are not drinking all that caffeine anymore.
Cheap canadian pharmacy
Valproic acid: when I was, early in my training, there was a race. It was like a Coke, Pepsi thing. Who was going to be the number one bipolar drug. Lithium of course had the championship, they had the throne, but these other contenders really wanted to take it away. The contenders were valproic acid and Tegretol. I’ll tell you what happened. The people who make valproic acid were very aggressive in marketing it, advertising it, and proving to the FDA that it was good for bipolar disorder. They did such a good job it sort of eclipsed lithium as a first line treatment. Typically considered inferior to lithium for treating the depressive phase. One advantage is that it can be loaded. You know the side effects; lethargy, alopecia, tremor, hepatotoxicity in kids. You need periodic blood monitoring. Particularly good for rapid cycling. If somebody is a rapid cycling bipolar disorder, they go from mania to depression, mania to depression, very quickly, Depakote or valproic acid is your drug of choice.

Carbamazepine: kind of took the third line seat, as history showed. Good for mania but it has its own side effects: neurological symptoms, elevation of liver enzymes, blood dyscrasias, you all know it promotes its own metabolism. You need to monitor the drug level enzymes. Causes low sodium.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Filed under Canadian health care mall

Canadian pharmacy
GI side effects, virtually no phototoxicity, no QT interval prolongation, the central nervous system side effects were not very marked, and it looked like an absolutely clean and safe drug. When it came along, I thought that this was going to be a world beater, because it was extremely active against the gram negatives – not pseudomonas, against the gram positives and against anaerobes. So here was a single drug that orally behaved just like imipenem, for example, or ticarcillin clavulanic acid. The entire spectrum of gram positives, gram negatives and anaerobes, with the exception of pseudomonas. It was approved for multiple different types of infection. The dose was 200 mg once a day orally or IV. It was a wonderful drug for nursing homes, where you may not be able to give IVS; you could give it orally and it covered everything. But after widespread use, after many, many millions of doses, it became apparent that there was hepatotoxicity and at last count there were about 12 patients who either died or had to have liver transplantation. One could look at the side effect virtue ratios of the drug and if you look at it that way, it’s still a great drug. But when somebody dies because of a drug, especially when it is more than one, the drug gets a very bad name and people become loathe to use it. The FDA came out with a statement that said that trovafloxacin should be used only for serious infections, only in hospitals or nursing homes, and usually the indication should be such that you are starting it IV. It should be given for no more than 14 days, although the duration with which the drug was given really didn’t seem to be a factor, in terms of the severe hepatotoxicity, and should only be used for the types of infections that all the quinolones are used for. New medication at our pharmacy shop viagra super active. Once you restrict a drug to initiate it only in hospitals or nursing homes, then you can continue it when they go home, you can’t give it for more than 14 days and there have been 12 deaths, you have a lawyer’s haven. The drug just really is not used anymore and you cannot get it on an out-patient basis, unless it has been started in an in-patient facility. I think it is a wonderful drug, but it is not going to be used anymore and my guess is that it will be withdrawn by the company, because they are not going to sell any – at least in this country.
Cialis Jelly
That is not the end of the story. There are many, many quinolones that are under development. These are the three that are closest to being marketed and they are approved in various ways. These three look cleaner than trovafloxacin – they should not cause the liver toxicity, they should not cause QT interval expansion or prolongation because of the way that the chemicals are formulated, but you just do not know and will not know until drugs are widely used. They all look relatively clean in terms of side effects. They are very much like trovafloxacin – they are all highly active against gram positives and gram negatives, except for pseudomonas. Ciprofloxacin remains by far the best quinolone against pseudomonas. These may have reasonable anaerobic activity. That is still being evaluated, however. They do not look quite as good as trovafloxacin, but they may be very close to trovafloxacin in anaerobic activity. Moxifloxacin will be the first to come out and we will get more information about moxifloxacin over a relatively short period of time. They all have very long half lives so once a day dosage will be the way they will be used. So it looks like we may have a replacement for trovafloxacin with moxifloxacin available soon and it has been proved.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Filed under Canadian health care mall, Drug Interactions

The pharmacokinetic drug/drug interactions actually start over on this side, on the left side, and move all the way through to the right side. And that is when you have drugs administered simultaneously and because of something that happens – either through absorption or distribution or metabolism – you have a change in the plasma concentration of one or both of those drugs. Then, because of that change in the plasma concentration, you have a change in how it acts at the receptor site and thus a change in effect.
Canadian Generic Viagra
Because of the way pharmacokinetic drug/drug interactions happen, or have changes in serum concentrations, we need to think about where those interactions happen. Basically they can happen in any step of the process that a drug goes through. From the time that it’s ingested to the time that it’s eliminated from the body. So it can happen in the gastrointestinal tract, it can happen because of changes in tissue or protein binding, it can happen in metabolism and it can also happen in excretion. So anywhere along that – we use the pneumogram of ADME, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion – anywhere along that ADME path you can have the drug/drug interactions occurring.
Pink viagra online
Okay, so what drugs in which patients do we need to be most concerned about? The drugs that we are most concerned about are those drugs which affect a vital process. What do I mean by a vital process? Well, those would things like seizure-threshold, cardiovascular rhythm, blood coagulation status, and respiratory function and also the drugs that have a narrow therapeutic index. How might you know if they have a narrow therapeutic index? The drugs that have narrow therapeutic indexes are the ones that we routinely monitor serum concentrations of. If you think about it, it’s really nice because it goes hand-in-hand with those drugs that affect a vital process. We monitor anticonvulsant levels, we monitor antiarrhythmic levels, we monitor theophylline levels and we don’t necessarily monitor warfarin and heparin levels but we monitor coagulation status. So those two things go really hand-in-hand and those are the drugs that we need to be most concerned about. As far as which patients; the patients that are critically ill, basically just because they happen to be on the greatest number of drugs. Probability will tell you that as a patient’s number of drugs increase, so does the likelihood that they would be on drugs that interact. Also the elderly patients. Again, because the elderly tend to have more disease processes going on and also tend to be on a greater number of medications.
Cheap Coreg
Pitfalls and literature evaluation. I just want to make a couple of comment about this. The first being inappropriate extrapolation. Basically what I mean by that is that if you happen to run across a case report in one of the journals that you are perusing, and it makes a comment about an interaction happening between verapamil, as a calcium channel blocker, and another drug. One thing that you want to be very careful about is not to assume that because verapamil interacts with a given drug that all of the calcium channel blockers interact with that drug. Because that’s not the case in many situations. It is in some but it’s not in all, and vice versa. You wouldn’t want to assume that because verapamil didn’t interact, that all of the calcium channel blockers would not interact. You need to be somewhat specific in trying to assimilate that information. Also I list excessive reliance on experience. This is kind of a touchy one and it gets more and more touchy the longer I’m out of school because you gather more and more experience and it’s really nice to draw upon experience. But again, you have to remember with the drug/drug interactions that there is a tremendous amount of inter-patient variability and just because you cold use theophylline and the ciprofloxacin together in one patient and there was not a problem, that does not mean that at some point you may not run into the problem. So you don’t want to discount the drug/drug interactions too quickly.
Canadian pharmacy

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Monday, April 21st, 2008

Filed under Canadian health care mall

Valtrex (VACV) is a 1-valyl ester of ACV. This drug has a five times greater bioavailability than oral ACV, reaching plasma levels of ACV similar to the level attained with intravenous ACV. Oral VACV was FDA-approved at a dose of 1000 mg three times per day for 7 days for the treatment of acute herpes zoster. This therapy was as safe as oral ACV but was more convenient than oral ACV and more effective in terms of zoster-associated pain. In direct comparison with ACV, treatment with VACV decreased the proportion of patients with pain at 6 months, whereas no differences were found between FCV and ACV treatment in the time for pain to disappear or in the incidence of PHN. VACV is approved for the episodic treatment of recurrent genital herpes at a dose of 500 mg twice a day for 5 days, and for therapy of first episode genital herpes at a dose of 1000 mg twice daily for 10 days. Recently, VACV at 500 mg once daily was approved for suppression of recurrent genital herpes. In all three situations, VACV is equally safe and effective as ACV but is more convenient.

Sorivudine (1-B-D-arabinofuranosyl-E-5-2-bromovinyl) uracil (BV-ara-U) is a synthetic deoxythymidine nucleoside analogue that is 1000 times more potent against VZV, in vitro, than ACV. This agent must also be phosphorylated into an active form. Sorivudine has been shown to have activity similar to ACV against HSV1, but little activity against HSV2. Sorivudine was not FDA-approved because of its potential for bone marrow suppression when used in combination with 5-fluorouracil and related compounds.

Three drugs are approved for CMV retinitis and other CMV infections: foscarnet, ganciclovir, and cidofovir, all of which are given intravenously. They are associated with higher rates of toxicity than are ACV, VACV, and FCV, which require viral thymidine kinase for activation but have little to no clinical activity against CMV. Recently, oral ganciclovir as well as a ganelclovir ocular implant were approved for CMV prophylaxis in immunocompromised patients, and foscarnet was approved for treatment of ACV-resistant HSV infections. Approval of topical cidofovir for this later indication is pending. Treatment of HHV type 6 and EBV infections is mainly symptomatic. Therapy of HHV type 8 infection is symptomatic (i.e., treatment of Kaposi’s sarcoma).

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Filed under Canadian health care mall

The treatment of acute herpes zoster requires acyclovir 800 mg orally to be given five times per day for 7 to 10 days. Acyclovir has also been shown to reduce the duration of symptoms of postherpetic neuralgia from 62 days for patients treated with placebo to 20 days for patients treated with acyclovir. One prospective cohort of 14,858 patients treated with oral acyclovir found a 3-month PHN incidence of 2.1%, lower than that for historical controls.

In addition to the oral form, ACV is also available in a topical as well as an intravenous preparation. Topical ACV continues to be used for therapy of HSV regardless of its low efficacy in that form. In immunocompromised patients with HSV or VZV, especially with disseminated disease, as well as in immunocompetent persons with severe trigeminal (especially ophthalmic) zoster, the intravenous form of ACV is preferred. This is because the efficacy of acyclovir is limited, owing to a 15% to 20% bioavailability when taken orally.

Because of the low bioavailability of oral ACV and the frequent dosing schedule, two additional drugs were approved for treatment of herpes. Both of these new drugs provide more convenient dosing and greater bioavailability than does oral acyclovir. Famciclovir (FCV) is the oral prodrug form of the acyclic nucleoside penciclovir, which must be phosphorylated like acyclovir to be active. Penciclovir triphosphate has a much longer intracellular half life than does acyclovir triphosphate (i.e., the T1/2 of penciclovir triphosphate is 10 to 20 hours in HSV-infected cells and 7 hours in VZV-infected cells in contrast to a T1/2 less than 1 hour for acyclovir triphosphate in either HSV-or VSV-infected cells). FCV also has a greater bioavailability than ACV when taken orally, 77% compared with 15% to 20%, respectively. This drug is FDA-approved for the episodic treatment of recurrent genital herpes at a dose of 125 mg twice a day for 5 days. FCV was shown to significantly reduce the symptoms of pain, burning, tenderness, and tingling in patients with recurrent genital herpes. Studies comparing ACV with FCV in the therapy of first episode genital herpes showed similar tolerability and side effects with no significant differences between the two in decreasing the period of viral shedding, time to complete healing, and loss of all symptoms. Recently, FCV at 250 mg twice daily was approved for suppression of recurrent genital herpes. FCV has also been shown to decrease the healing time of cutaneous manifestations of herpes zoster as well as reduce the duration of PHN. FCV is FDA-approved for the therapy of acute herpes zoster at a dose of 500 mg three times daily for 7 days. The topical form of penciclovir is also available and is the first FDA-approved antiviral drug for the episodic treatment of herpes labialis in healthy patients.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Filed under Canadian health care mall

HERPES SIMPLEX VIRUS AND OTHER HUMAN HERPES VIRUSES
The human herpes viruses (HHV) are double-stranded linear DNA viruses that cause a variety of different cutaneous manifestations. Included in the herpes family are herpes simplex virus type 1 and type 2, known to cause cold sores and genital lesions, respectively, although both types of lesions can be caused by either virus. These two subtypes have also been known to cause gingivostomatitis, herpes gladiatorum, eczema herpeticum, herpes whitlow, neonatal herpes, lumbosacral herpes, herpetic keratoconjunctivitis, herpes encephalitis, and cervicitis, and are a leading cause of erythema multiforme. Human herpes virus type 3 (varicella zoster) presents in its primary form as chickenpox, and in a recurrent form as herpes zoster or shingles. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) (HHV4) is commonly known to cause infectious mononucleosis. Human herpes virus type 5 is more commonly known as cytomegalovirus (CMV) and is the leading cause of blindness in AIDS patients and a leading infectious cause of fetal abnormalities. Human herpes virus type 6 (HHV 6) is recognized as the cause of exanthem subitum (roseola infantum), which was known as “sixth disease” long before HHV type 6 was recognized. There is no specific disease linked to HHV type 7; however, this is a T-cell lymphotropic virus that has also serologically been associated with roseola. Human herpes virus type 8 (HHV8) is associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) in HIV-infected persons as well as with classic KS. Herpesvirus simiae, also known as B virus, is a nonhuman herpes virus that is of great importance to humans because of the high mortality rate from encephalomyelitis in persons infected with this virus.

Ten drugs are FDA-approved for treatment of herpes virus infections. Idoxuridine, trifluridine, and vidarabine are ophthalmic preparations used for herpes keratitis and keratoconjunctivitis. Vidarabine was previously approved for systemic use for herpes but was discontinued because its neurotoxicity and the advent of acyclovir, a safer agent. Acyclovir (9-2-hydroxyethoxymethyl guanine) is the most widely prescribed antiviral drug in the world. After its oral intake acyclovir becomes phosphorylated by a thymidine kinase (TK) specific for the herpes virus, resulting in a mono-phosphorylated form of acyclovir that must then be bi-and tri-phosphorylated by cellular enzymes. The triphosphate form inhibits viral DNA polymerase, resulting in chain termination. The herpesvirus-infected cells produce TK at a rate 100 times greater than that produced by uninfected cells after the uptake of acyclovir.

The most widely used form of acyclovir (ACV) is the oral form. Oral ACV is used for the therapy of oral, genital, and other HSV infections. For first episode genital herpes, the usual dose of ACV is 200 mg five times per day for 10 days, and for recurrent herpes the same dose can be used for 5 days. For greater convenience, 400 mg of ACV three times per day can be used in place of 200 mg five times per day. Acyclovir has a greater effect on first episode genital herpes than on recurrent disease, but if initiated during the prodrome of a recurrence, it may show significant benefit. If taken daily, acyclovir suppresses the signs and symptoms of genital herpes as well as reduces asymptomatic viral shedding of HSV2 by 95%. For patients with significantly severe or frequently recurring outbreaks, ACV suppression with 400 mg twice daily reduces the frequency of genital herpes by 80% to 90% and herpes labialis by 50% to 78%.

The recommended oral dose of acyclovir for chickenpox is 20 mg/kg four times daily; in adults, the average dose is 800 mg five times per day. Treatment needs to be initiated early for it to be effective. Viral replication usually starts about 2 weeks prior to the development of signs and symptoms. The initiation of acyclovir does not affect the humoral response to VZV, hence there is an adequate antibody response to VZV in patients treated with acyclovir.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Monday, November 5th, 2007