Human Drug Metabolism: An Introduction

by Michael D. Coleman

Drug metabolism is a core area of pharmacology. Before any drug can be licensed it is essential to know how the body metabolises the drug, and the short and long-term effects it has on the body.  It is an area of rapid advancement, which brings together the fields of pharmacy, pharmacology and medicine. This new text provides a concise, user-friendly introduction to drug metabolism that is ideal for undergraduates. Focusing on a conceptual understanding  of the drug metabolism system, the book illustrates the basic mechanisms on how xenobiotics are detected, chemically modified and then eliminated from human systems.

Genres: Science, Medicine

286 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2005

Reviews

[Larva · Rating 1 out of 5]

Edit: The author was probably done dirty by the publisher or editor. His explanations seem sound, but it's very clear, even to a chemistry newbie like me, that someone botched the structure drawings.

Original review:
Many incorrect chemical structure drawings and names. Occasional grammar errors in the plain text. It's such a shame, the author has a nice style and this book is very readable but the many misprinted and mislabeled structure drawings are alarming. How can a student trust this book for general metabolism knowledge when it can't even depict THC and MDMA correctly?

Page 210:
- wildly wrong structure drawings for 3-butenal, epoxybutene, butenediol, diepoxybutene, and dihydroxyepoxybutene (two of these have identical copypasted incorrect structure lol)

Page 239:
- bizarre extraneous hydrogens on structures of MDMA and MDA

Page 242:
- identical incorrect structures for delta-8 and delta-9-THC (misplaced double bonds-this matters a lot especially for these two!)
- extra (wrong) double bonds in the 11-hydroxy and 9-carboxy products of delta-9-THC

...so this is a pretty fun book if you know a bit, or want to learn more, about chemical structure diagrams. I've been playing "find the impossible molecules" and "is this even the correct name for this" by checking PubChem.

This is almost a 20 year old book, so hopefully not in use, but these mistakes should have been appalling even when it was printed in 2005.

[Usfromdk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's not perfect, but I couldn't possibly justify giving it anything but a five star rating. An impressive amount of work was done by the author, and an impressive amount of content is covered in the book, considering the page count. It's an introductory text, but it's a reasonably comprehensive one. The book is a bit technical for an introductory book, and you probably shouldn't try to read it unless you have at least some knowledge of basic biochemistry (you should definitely stay away from it if you don't find biochem at least somewhat interesting - the again if that were the case why'd you be reading a book like this in the first place?). The work is quite dense and I'd say that in general it's the sort of book where you won't be able to read and understand the stuff that's covered unless you're reasonably focused and concentrated while reading - if you're not fully focused you might as well not bother reading it at all.

I really liked the occasional amusing side notes and comments added by the author here and there, which even made me laugh once or twice; despite being in general a serious and comprehensive textbook, the book was also actually occasionally quite fun to read (in particular I liked the part of the appendix dealing with the metabolism of illicit drugs).

[Risto Saarelma]

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