[Clinico-pharmacokinetic aspects of the optimization of psychopharmacotherapy]

One of the main problems of psychopharmacotherapy is high variability of therapeutic effects. The traditional clinical approach to the optimization of psychopharmacotherapy based on the characterization of the spectrum of drug action and individual characteristics of the disease has certain limitations. When the clinical approach is supplemented with pharmacokinetic measurements it becomes possible to specify the choice of drug and to select an individual regimen of administration ensuring an effective level of active forms of the drug in the blood. A successful development of the clinico-pharmacokinetic direction at the present stage is due to improvement and standardization of methods of clinical and pharmacokinetic examination which help to ensure a reliable pretreatment identification of patients potentially sensitive to pharmacotherapy, to determine all active forms of drugs in biomedia, to establish the correlation between therapeutic and side effects on the one hand and the active concentrations of these forms on the other, as well as to select the most informative clinical and pharmacokinetic parameters. The general theoretical and practical value of clinico-pharmacokinetic studies is confirmed by the findings accumulated by now.