ABSTRACT
Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM)/toxicology has been firmly established as a subspecialty within the clinical laboratory. This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book reviews the fundamentals, the instrumentations, the major classes of drugs and their clinical pharmacology, and liquid chromatography (LC) assays and outlines potentially useful instrumentations and possible areas of TDM. Computer interfacing remains an important goal for the laboratory in the 1980s. As noted by Scott, it may be more desirable to achieve a good separation than to resolve peaks using computer programming. In reviewing LC monitoring of major classes of drugs, anticonvulsants, antiarrhythmics, and antiasthmatics may be cost-effectively measured as a result of the availability of multidrug analyses. TDM/toxicology may expand into the health care of selected patient groups such as oncologic, pediatric, renal, obstetric, and geriatric specialties. The potential application of microbore and supercritical LC awaits further studies.
