Question

A football player weighing 350 pounds is being treated for an infection with a drug with a small/narrow therapeutic index during the offseason. He comes to training camp to get into shape and proceeds to quickly loose 30 pounds. Suddenly, he is rushed to the hospital with a reaction to the antimicrobial agent. What might have happened to cause this?

Answer 1

Drugs of the narrow therapeutic index (NTI) are drugs where the margin between therapeutic value and toxicity is very thin. In this kind of drugs if there is slight alteration in dosing or concentration of drug in the blood happens then it can lead to several side effects.

Now , let us consider what happened in present case-

The football player was given a drug (NTI) for treatment of infection on the basis of his bodyweight which was 350 pound. Dose calculation of drug is essentially done on the basis of body weight. So, what was proper dose at 350 pound, became overdose at 320 pound

But when the Footballer lost significant amount of weight (lost 30 pound and effectively reaches weight of 320 pound) then the pre calculated amount of drug which was calculated on the basis of his earlier weight (360 pound) became high.

Therefore, the footballer was rushed to hospital because of drug overdose because of loss of weight.