Abstract

Area under the curve of concentration versus time (AUC) is considered an important indicator of drug availability. It is a common practice to take measurements at various time points for each experimental unit in the study and AUC values can be estimated using trapezoidal rule for each unit. In case that only one measurement for each experimental unit has been recorded as experimental unit has to be sacrificed for collecting sample, there are methods for estimating area under the curve with only one sample per experimental unit. In such cases, multiple experimental units are used for each data point post dose. An evaluation of various methods available for estimating AUC and standard deviation (SD) of estimated AUC is made in this paper when destructive measurement techniques are used. It is found that among other existing methods, resampling method is a powerful tool to predict AUC and standard deviation of estimated AUC even if AUC is a non-linear function of concentrations.