Medication and Pharmacology Terms
Medicines, investigational drugs, drug classes, actions, and routes of administration. Browse definitions and meanings below.
What is pharmacology?
Pharmacology is the study of how drugs act on the body and how the body acts on drugs. It covers what a medicine does once it arrives at its target, how it is absorbed and eliminated, and why dose, timing and route change the result.
Much of the vocabulary here is shorthand that appears on a prescription or in a clinical note. Route abbreviations, dosing intervals and drug class names all carry exact meanings, and the entries below give each one plainly.
Terms in this topic
Alphabetical order-
A substance being studied in the treatment of cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of some types of cancer and other conditions.
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A drug used to treat breast cancer that has spread or that has come back within 6 months after chemotherapy.
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A prostate cancer tablet that shuts down testosterone production everywhere in the body, not only in the testicles.
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Abraxane is a brand name chemotherapy drug that delivers paclitaxel bound to albumin nanoparticles to treat several types of cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of lymphomas and other types of cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of several types of cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of breast cancers caused by mutations (changes) in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
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Four drugs chosen as much for what they avoid as for what they do, because the disease is usually cured and survivors live decades.
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A preventer rather than a reliever, blocking one specific chemical pathway of asthma instead of damping inflammation broadly.
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A drug that is used to lower blood pressure.
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Known as paracetamol outside the United States, and present in so many combination products that a total intake is easy to lose track of.
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One molecule with two unrelated jobs: thinning sticky mucus in the airway, and rescuing the liver after a paracetamol overdose.
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A substance being studied in the prevention of breast cancer in women at high risk of breast cancer.
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A substance being studied in the treatment of cancer.
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A drug put on the skin to treat growths caused by sun exposure.
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Actos is the brand name for pioglitazone, an oral medication that improves the body's response to insulin in type 2 diabetes.
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Its safety rests on a trick of chemistry: the drug stays inert until a viral enzyme switches it on, so uninfected cells ignore it.
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A drug used to treat bladder cancer that does not respond to BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guerin).