Therapeutic Reference Ranges for Psychotropic Drugs: A Protocol for Systematic Reviews.

ABSTRACT: Background: For many psychotropic drugs, monitoring of drug concentrations in the blood (Therapeutic Drug Monitoring; TDM) has been proven useful to individualize treatments and optimize drug effects. Clinicians hereby compare individual drug concentrations to population-based reference ranges for a titration of prescribed doses. Thus, established reference ranges are pre-requisite for TDM. For psychotropic drugs, guideline-based ranges are mostly expert recommendations derived from a conglomerate of cohort and cross-sectional studies. A systematic approach for identifying therapeutic reference ranges has not been published yet. This paper describes how to search, evaluate and grade the available literature and validate published therapeutic reference ranges for psychotropic drugs. Methods

SUBMITTER: Hart XM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8653700 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature