The role of patient selection and patient description in clinical pharmacological studies

Clinical pharmacological studies have contributed substantially to our understanding of drugs, in particular in the area of clinical pharmacokinetics. We are impressed by the enormous progress in the analytical methodology (GC, HPLC, mass spectroscopy) to an extent, that some simple aspects of clinical studies have been neglected in favor of newer and more sophisticated techniques. Consequently, characterization and selection of patients in published studies is often surprisingly poor and diminishes the quality of otherwise good clinical pharmacological data.