Therapeutic drug monitoring of lamotrigine in a paediatric population

Abstract

PURPOSE: Therapeutic drug monitoring is important for drugs that exhibit interindividual variability in pharmacokinetics, and where drug-drug interactions, concurrent disease or age alters the kinetics of that drug. This is of particular importance in a chronic neurological condition such as epilepsy. In this study, the value of therapeutic drug monitoring for lamotrigine, a novel antiepileptic drug, was investigated in a group of paediatric patients.

METHOD: Plasma lamotrigine levels in 20 paediatric patients (mean ±S.D., age 8.85±3.47 years and weight, 32.22±20.81 kg) were measured using a novel validated high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technique that gave a retention time for lamotrigine and internal standard of 1.258 min and 2.30 min respectively. The method proved to be linear, precise and reproducible over the plasma concentration range of 0.08–20mg/.

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