A review on the clinical pharmacokinetics of hydralazine

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Hydralazine is a vasodilator used to treat hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and heart failure. The current article reviews the clinical pharmacokinetics (PK) of hydralazine, which can be useful for clinicians in optimizing its dose and dosing frequency to avoid adverse effects and unexpected interactions that could risk patients’ lives.

Areas covered

This review has summarized the PK parameters for hydralazine after performing an extensive literature search. It includes 20 publications that were selected after applying eligibility criteria out of a pool of literature that was searched using Google Scholar, PubMed, Cochrane Central, and EBSCO databases. The included studies consisted of concentration vs. time profiles of hydralazine. If the PK data were not tabulated in the given study, the concentration vs. time profiles were scanned for the extraction of the PK data. The PK parameters were calculated by applying a non-compartmental analysis (NCA).

Expert Opinion

The current review will aid clinicians in understanding hydralazine PK in different disease populations. This clinical PK data might also be helpful in the development of a pharmacokinetic model of hydralazine.

KEYWORDS:

• Drug-drug interactions
• drug-disease interactions
• diseased population
• hydralazine
• healthy population
• pharmacokinetics (PK)
• special population

Article highlights

• Hydralazine is a direct-acting vasodilator that has been used since the 1950s for blood pressure management and this is the first review that has summarized clinical PK data for hydralazine.

• This review summarizes the clinical PK of hydralazine in healthy, diseased, and special populations and it also includes data on its drug-drug and drug-food interactions.

• This review highlights the significant impact of aceylator type on hydralazine PK.

• The reported values for the PK parameters in different populations can help the readers in understanding the underlying differences in PK of hydralazine.

• The presented PK data can assist the researchers in developing and evaluating PK models of hydralazine.

This box summarizes key points contained in the article.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

All authors have made substantial contributions to the design, extraction, analysis, and interpretation of data and have actively participated in drafting and revising the article. All authors agreed to submit the final version to the journal and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Data availability statement

All the data used for this publication are either presented in the main article or are available as supplementary information.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17425255.2022.2129005

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.