Safe Practices for IVIG Management

For those who’d like to read more:

[url]http://www.pppmag.com/article/753/September_2010/Safe_Practices_for_IVIG_Management/[/url]

An excerpt: “[I]…PP&P: Do you always dose on actual patient weight?

JS: There is much discussion as to what weight should be used when determining IVIG dosing. The assumption has been to dose based on the patient’s actual weight; however, if you study the pharmacokinetics of IVIG, as an immunoglobulin, it does not really distribute into fat, so the volume of distribution may in fact be higher in a patient at an ideal weight as opposed to a patient who is obese. Given this, once a patient’s weight is greater than 100 kg or their BMI is greater than 30, it is advisable to adjust their IVIG dose as follows to determine a more accurate dosing weight: first, take the difference between the patient’s actual weight and their ideal weight as defined by the Metropolitan Life tables and divide this in half; then, add this figure to their ideal weight. Based on this formula, if a patient weighed 120 kg and their ideal weight was 60 kg, 90 kg would be the dosing weight. This means that if the prescribed dose for the patient is 1 g of IVIG per kg, instead of 120 g, the patient would receive 90 g. Dosing based on this method significantly impacts both cost and waste… [/I]”

Does ‘js’ have good credentials? couldn’t say.

“.[I]..Jerry Siegel, PharmD, FASHP, is the former senior director for pharmaceutical services at The Ohio State University Medical Center, where he worked for over 35 years…[/I]”