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Gamma Generalized Linear Models For Pharmacokinetic Data, Ruth Salway, Jon Wakefield

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

This paper considers the modeling of single dose pharmacoki- netic data. Traditionally, so-called compartmental models have been used to analyze such data. Unfortunately the mean function of such models are sums of exponentials for which inference and computation may not be straightfor- ward. We present an alternative to these models based on generalized linear models, for which desirable statistical properties exist, with a logarithmic link and gamma distribution. The latter has a constant coefficient of variation which is often appropriate for pharmacokinetic data. Inference is convenient from either a likelihood or a Bayesian perspective. We consider models for both single …