Pharmacometric Models in Anesthesia and Analgesia

Abstract: Modeling is a valuable tool in drug development, to support decision making, improving study design, and aid in regulatory approval and labeling. This thesis describes the development of pharmacometric models for drugs used in anesthesia and analgesia.Models describing the effects on anesthetic depth, measured by the bispectral index (BIS), for a commonly used anesthetic, propofol, and for a novel anesthetic, AZD3043, were developed. The propofol model consisted of two effect-site compartments, and could describe the effects of propofol when the rate of infusion is changed during treatment. AZD3043 had a high clearance and a low volume of distribution, leading to a short half-life. The distribution to the effect site was fast, and together with the short plasma half-life leading to a fast onset and offset of effects. It was also shown that BIS after AZD3043 treatment is related to the probability of unconsciousness similar to propofol.In analgesia studies dropout due to lack of efficacy is common. This dropout is not at random and needs to be taken into consideration in order to avoid bias. A model was developed describing the PK, pain intensity and dropout hazard for placebo, naproxen and a novel analgesic compound, naproxcinod, after removal of a wisdom tooth. The model provides an opportunity to describe the effects of other doses or formulations. Visual predictive checks created by simultaneous simulations of PI and dropout provided a good way of assessing the goodness of fit when there is informative dropout.The performance of non-linear mixed effects models in the presence of informative dropout, with and without including models that describe such informative dropout was investigated by simulations and re-estimations. When a dropout model was not included there was in general more bias. The bias increased with decreasing number of observations per subject, increasing placebo effect and increasing dropout rate. Bias was relatively unaffected by the number of subjects in the study. The bias had, in general, little effect on simulations of the underlying efficacy score, but a dropout model would still be needed in order to make realistic simulations.