Individualized dosing with anesthetic agents.

The development of fundamental pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics concepts has enabled anesthesiologists to choose and dose anesthetic agents on a rational basis. The application of these concepts to a variety of clinical scenarios and patient populations makes it possible to individualize the dose, thereby decreasing the risk of complications. As more knowledge is gained about the sometimes profound differences in drug response, empirical dosing such as in milligrams per kilogram of total body weight is disappearing from the anesthesia specialty.