| This book is designed to provide a complete, authoritative, current, and readable pharmacology textbook for students in the health sciences. It also offers special features that make it useful to house officers and practicing clinicians.
Information is organized according to the sequence used in many pharmacology courses and in integrated organ system curricula: basic principles; autonomic drugs; cardiovascular-renal drugs; drugs with important actions on smooth muscle; central nervous system drugs; drugs used to treat inflammation, gout, and diseases of the blood; endocrine drugs; chemotherapeutic drugs; toxicology; and special topics. This sequence builds new information on a foundation of information already assimilated. For example, early presentation of autonomic pharmacology allows students to integrate the physiology and neuroscience they know with the pharmacology they are learning and prepares them to understand the autonomic effects of other drugs. This is especially important for the cardiovascular and central nervous system drug groups. However, chapters can be used equally well in courses and curricula that present these topics in a different sequence.
Within each chapter, emphasis is placed on discussion of drug groups and prototypes rather than offering repetitive detail about individual drugs. Selection of the subject matter and the order of its presentation are based on the accumulated experience of teaching this material to thousands of medical, pharmacy, dental, podiatry, nursing, and other health science students.
Major features that make this book especially useful to professional students include sections that specifically address the clinical choice and use of drugs in patients and the monitoring of their effects—in other words, clinical pharmacology is an integral part of this text. Lists of the commercial preparations available, including trade and generic names and dosage formulations, are provided at the end of each chapter for easy reference by the house officer or practitioner writing a chart order or prescription.
Significant revisions in this edition include the following:
Major revisions of the chapters on prostaglandins, nitric oxide, anti-inflammatory drugs, hypothalamic and pituitary hormones, antidiabetic drugs, antiviral drugs, and immunopharmacology
Many new figures, most in color, that help to clarify important concepts in pharmacology
Many descriptions of important developments based on genetically modified mice (“knockout” and “knockin” mice), a research tool of great importance in pharmacology
Continuing expansion of the coverage of general concepts relating to receptors and listings of newly discovered drug transporters and receptors
Descriptions of important new drugs released through August 2006, including numerous new immunopharmacologic agents
An important related source of information is Katzung & Trevor's Pharmacology: Examination & Board Review, 7th ed (Trevor AJ, Katzung BG, & Masters SB: McGraw-Hill, 2005). This book provides a succinct review of pharmacology with one of the largest available collections of sample examination questions and answers. It is especially helpful to students preparing for board-type examinations. A more highly condensed source of information suitable for review purposes is USMLE Road Map: Pharmacology, 2nd ed (Katzung BG, Trevor AJ: McGraw-Hill, 2006).
This edition marks the 25th year of publication of Basic & Clinical Pharmacology. The widespread acceptance of the first nine editions suggests that this book fills an important need. We believe that the tenth edition will satisfy this need even more successfully. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Czech, Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese translations are available. Translations into other languages are under way; the publisher may be contacted for further information.
I wish to acknowledge the prior and continuing efforts of my contributing authors and the major contributions of the staff at Lange Medical Publications, Appleton & Lange, and more recently at McGraw-Hill, and of our editors, Alison Kelley and Donna Frassetto. I also wish to thank my wife, Alice Camp, for her expert proofreading contributions since the first edition.
Special thanks and recognition are due James Ransom, PhD, the long-time Senior Editor at Lange Medical Publications, who provided major inspiration and invaluable guidance through the first eight editions of the book. Without him, this book would not exist.
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