INTRODUCTION Over the past 20 years, treatment of acute myocardial infarction has improved through more rapid recognition of symptoms, treatment with fibrin-specific thrombolytics and percutaneous coronary intervention, and clinical trials that have demonstrated reductions in morbidity and mortality with appropriate acute treatment and secondary prevention. Specifically, evidence now supports the use of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA), [...]

Based on the fastest degradation rate observed, with 95% confidence, this study has demonstrated that solutions of norepinephrine, diluted in NS or D5W to a concentration of 64.5 mg/L and stored for 60 days with protection from light at 4°C and then at room temperature for an additional 24 h, will retain more than 95% [...]

Accelerated Degradation and Assay Validation Degradation of norepinephrine with heat and base (pH 8.264) occurred relatively quickly, such that less than 1% of the initial norepinephrine concentration remained after 37 min. As the norepinephrine concentration decreased, degradation products eluted at 1.3, 1.7, 2.1, 2.5, 2.8, and 4.8 min. These degradation products were well separated from [...]

Stability Study On study day 0, 4 mL of a 1 mg/mL solution of norepinephrine (norepinephrine bitartrate injection USP, Sandoz Canada Inc; lot 149812, expiry April 2010) was with­drawn from a vial and further diluted in a 50-mL polyvinyl chloride (PVC) minibag of 5% D5W (Baxter Corporation, Mississauga, Ontario; lot P230821, expiry June 2010) to [...]

Liquid Chromatography The liquid chromatographic system consisted of an isocratic solvent delivery pump (model P4000, Thermo Separation Products, San Jose, California), which pumped a mixture of acetonitrile (OmniSolv; EMD Chemicals Inc, Gibbstown, New Jersey) and 0.05 M phosphoric acid (catalogue no. P286; Fisher Scientific, Toronto, Ontario) containing 1 mg/mL of heptane sulfonic acid (catalogue no. [...]

INTRODUCTION The expiry date of medications intended for IV administra­tion following reconstitution or dilution is often limited to about 24 h, even when data on extended stability exist, because of the potential for breaks in sterility and contamination of the product. However, when reconstitution and dilution are carried out in a sterile environment, based on [...]

The limitations of this study included its retrospective and observational design. Also, the study design prevented assessment of clinical outcomes. We cannot say for certain that age was the only factor influencing the need for q8h dosing. We performed basic statistical comparisons of mean age, sex, mean serum creatinine, and mean creatinine clearance (as calculated [...]