Therapeutic drug monitoring of nifedipine by HPLC-MS/MS in treatment of arterial hypertension
The method for the determination of nifedipine and dehydronifedipine in human serum for therapeutic drug monitoring in patients with arterial hypertension using HPLC-MS/MS was developed and validated. The study involved 42 patients taking nifedipine in the form of modified-release tablets. It has been shown that therapeutic drug monitoring of nifedipine is advisable to be performed both when administering dose of 30 mg (to identify patients needing to increase the dose of the drug to achieve the desired therapeutic effect), and when administering doses of 60 mg and 90 mg to identify patients with a high tendency to the development of side-effects. Simultaneous determination of nifedipine and dehydronifedipine in human serum allows to determine the phenotype of each patient according to the rate of nifedipine metabolism and to adjust the dose and the frequency of taking the drug depending on the intensity of biotransformation.