Introduction To Pharmacokinetics

The Trapezoidal Rule

AREA TO INFINITY

To find the area of the extrapolated part of the curve, you need to find the area under the curve from your last time point right up until the concentration is zero.

However, this type of curve shows exponential decay: the curve approaches zero on the x-axis but never reaches zero.

How, therefore, can you calculate the area of a curve when the curve goes on to infinity, how can you calculate the area of the final trapezoid?

Linear Graph

To find the area of the extrapolated part of the curve, you use the following equation where CLast is the last recorded concentration measurement and k is the rate constant of the slope:

Equation