Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Address correspondence to Courtney M. Pharmacokinetics of levofloxacin in children treated for exposure to drug-resistant tuberculosis. Antimicrob Agents Chemother e All Rights Reserved. Levofloxacin is used to treat and prevent drug-resistant tuberculosis in children. We assessed levofloxacin serum drug concentrations in 24 children aged 2 to 10 years who received levofloxacin-based tuberculosis preventive therapy in Karachi, Pakistan.
Only 9 children Target serum drug concentration was met in 4 Levofloxacin dosing recommendations may require reevaluation. Levofloxacin is used to treat children with drug-resistant tuberculosis DR-TB that cannot be treated with first-line drugs 1.
Some programs have used levofloxacin-based preventive therapy to prevent development of disease in these children because standard preventive therapy regimens based on isoniazid or rifamycins are unlikely to be effective 2 — 4. When using levofloxacin for prevention, dosing typically follows recommendations for treatment of disease.
The childhood TB guidelines recommend 7. However, the sufficiency of these dosing recommendations is unclear. Published pharmacokinetic studies of children treated for DR-TB disease or exposure are limited to cohorts from the U. Because these conflicting results come from two geographically distinct settings, it is not clear which findings, if either, are generalizable to other countries.
To help resolve the question of whether currently recommended levofloxacin doses are sufficient for children in Pakistan, we conducted a pharmacokinetic assessment of children receiving levofloxacin-based preventive therapy under programmatic conditions for DR-TB exposure in Karachi, Pakistan Levofloxacin was available in and mg tablets Macleods Pharmaceutical Ltd.
