Large or Food Animal and Equine Medicine Commons^™

Pharmacokinetics And Protein Binding Of Morphine In Horses, Joan Combie, Thomas E. Nugent, Thomas Tobin

Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research Center Faculty Publications

Morphine could be detected in horses dosed with 0.1 mg of drug/kg of body weight for up to 48 hours in blood and 144 hours in urine. This dose of morphine elicited no observ­able effects and is a suggested an­algesic dose. Computer analysis revealed that a 3-compartment open system was the best fitting model with a serum half life of 87.9 minutes and a urine half life of 101.1 minutes. Binding to equine serum proteins was linear over a drug con­centration range of 3.88 x 10-5M to 3.50 x 10-aM and averaged 31.6%. In RBC-partitioning experiments, 78.1 % of the …