A graduate of the University of Michigan with a PharmD, Dr. Ashkan Khabazian serves as the lead emergency department clinical pharmacist at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. In this position, Dr. Ashkan Khabazian works with hospital staff to manage and optimize pharmacokinetics, or how the human body reacts to a drug.
The way a drug is absorbed, metabolized, and excreted from the body depends on many factors, among them genetic makeup, sex, and age. The half-life of some drugs, particularly those that require both metabolism and excretion, is very long in elderly patients. As the general population ages and more medications become available, it’s vital that a clinical pharmacist predicts how multiple medications may interact with each other, and whether such interactions are contributing to a patient’s symptoms when they present in the hospital.
The ultimate goal of clinical pharmacokinetics is to enhance efficacy and decrease toxicity in a patient’s drug therapy. In elderly patients, this usually requires that the dosage of certain drugs be decreased, especially for patients who take more than one daily medication. A good thing to remember when dosing medication in the geriatric population is to "start low & go slow", meaning start on lower end of the dose range and titrate up slower than you typically would. Particularly with medications that are of fall risk.
