Advantages
In addition to the usual ones of combination therapy, advantages of fixed-dose combinations include:
- Improved medication compliance by reducing the pill burden of patients.
- Ability to compose combined profiles of for example pharmacokinetics, effects and adverse effects that may be specific for the relative dosages, providing a simpler overview compared to when looking at the profiles of each single drug individually. Such a combined profile can also include effects caused by interaction between the individual drugs that may be omitted in individual drug profiles.
- Since FDCs are reviewed by regulating agencies (such as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States), the active ingredients used in the FDCs are unlikely to exhibit adverse drug interactions with each other. However, FDCs may interact with other drugs that a patient is taking.
- For the pharmaceutical company, fixed-dose combination drug products may be developed by a pharmaceutical company as a way to extend the marketability of a drug product. Since FDCs may be protected by patents, a company may obtain exclusive rights to sell the FDC, even though the individual active ingredients may be off-patent.
Read more about this topic: Combination Drug
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