A Skew Normal Model of the Dose-Effect Relation in Pharmacology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a skew-normal statistical model to describe the dose-effect relationship in pharmacology, encompassing therapeutic responses and side-effects, with properties of logistic functions and an application to rat escape time data.

Contribution

It presents a novel skew-normal model for dose-effect relations and explores its properties, including an application to experimental antidepressant data.

Findings

Properties of logistic functions are established.

A skew-normal model is fitted to rat escape time data.

The model effectively captures asymmetry in dose-response relationships.

Abstract

This paper deals with a skew-normal model of the relation between a dose $d > 0$ and a quantitative measure $E(d)$ of an effect of the administered drug. Precisely, $E(d)$ is a measure of the therapeutic response or a measure of a side-effect. Some existing and additional properties of the logistic functions are proved, and a skew-normal model of the escape time of rats under an experimental antidepressant medication is provided.