Pharmacokinetics
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
Pharmacokinetics is a branch of pharmacology dedicated to the determination of the fate of substances administered externally to a living organism. In practice, this discipline is applied mainly to drug substances, though in principle it concerns itself with all manner of compounds ingested or otherwise delivered externally to an organism, such as nutrients, internal metabolites, hormones, toxins, etc. Pharmacokinetics studies the manner and extent of absorption of a substance, the distribution of this substance throughout the fluids and tissues of the body, the succesive metabolic transformations of the compound and its daughter metabolites and finally, the elimination of the parent substance and its metabolites or, in rare cases, their irreversible accumulation in a tissue.
So while pharmacodynamics explores what a drug does to the body, pharmacokinetics explores what the body does with the drug.
