[The pharmacokinetics of antibiotics: parenteral and oral administration, distribution in the organism, elimination].
The efficacy of antimicrobial therapy is largely dependent on the pharmacokinetics of the drug. Pharmacokinetics is the study of the kinetics, that is of the movements of drugs in the body fluids and tissue cells. Often, despite the complexity of mammalian organism, relatively simple compartmental systems are capable to describe the kinetics of many drugs and to provide a rationale in interpreting the experimental results. As most bacterial infections are localized in tissues, the pharmacokinetic modelling of antimicrobial agents should mainly be devoted to clarify the relationship between plasma and tissue drug levels, the former being easily accessible to sampling and the latter more closely related to therapeutic efficacy. In this paper an introduction to pharmacokinetic modelling is presented and the pharmacokinetics of many antimicrobial drugs is discussed.