6533b7dbfe1ef96bd1271478

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Isosorbide dinitrate: pharmacokinetics after intravenous administration.

subject

description

Isosorbide dinitrate (ISDN) is an important organic nitrate found therapeutically useful in its sublingual and oral forms in various cardiovascular diseases such as angina pectoris (1) and congestive heart failure (2). Recently Distante et al. (3) showed that an intravenous infusion of this drug, at 0.021–0.083 mg/min is also effective in managing unstable angina. The availability of an intravenous dosage form of ISDN not only affords the opportunity to characterize the pharmacokinetics of this drug after this particular mode of therapy, but also gives the possibility of assessing the bio-availability of this drug after other (e.g., oral) routes of administration in patients. This latter point has been a subject of major controversy ever since Needleman et al. (4) made the assertion that oral nitrate therapy is irrational because of its complete first-pass metabolism.