Department of Pharmacology and Center for Substance Abuse Research, Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
J Clin Pharm Ther. 2013 Jun;38(3):190-5. doi: 10.1111/jcpt.12055. Epub 2013 Apr 3.
Individuals who abuse drugs usually use more than one substance. Toxic consequences of single and multi-drug use are well documented in the Treatment Episodes Data Set that lists drug combinations that result in hospital admissions. Using this list as a guide, we focused our attention on combinations that result in the most hospital admissions and searched the PubMed database with the objective of determining the number of such publications and, in particular, those that used the term synergism in their titles or abstracts.
Using the search criteria produced an extensive list of published articles. However, a further intersection of the search terms with the term isobole revealed a surprisingly small number of literature reports.
Because the method of isoboles is the most common quantitative method for distinguishing between drug synergism and simple additivity, the small number of investigations that actually employed this quantification suggests that the term synergism is not properly documented in describing the toxicity among abused substances. The possible reasons for this lack of quantification may be related to a misunderstanding of the modelling equations. To help rectify this possible hurdle to understanding and clinical utility, the theory and modelling are discussed here.
滥用药物的个体通常会使用一种以上的物质。在列出导致住院的药物组合的治疗发作数据集中，记录了单一药物和多药物使用的毒性后果。我们根据该列表作为指导，将注意力集中在导致住院人数最多的组合上，并在 PubMed 数据库中进行搜索，目的是确定此类出版物的数量，特别是那些在标题或摘要中使用协同作用一词的出版物。
使用搜索标准生成了大量已发表文章的列表。然而，进一步将搜索词与等效应线术语相交，发现文献报道的数量惊人地少。
由于等效应线的方法是区分药物协同作用和简单相加的最常用定量方法，实际上使用这种定量方法的调查数量很少，这表明协同作用一词在描述滥用物质的毒性方面没有得到适当记录。这种缺乏量化的可能原因可能与对模型方程的误解有关。为了帮助纠正对理解和临床应用的这一可能障碍，本文讨论了理论和模型。
