Route of Administration
Intramuscular
Last updated
Injection into muscle tissue, below the subcutaneous fat. Muscle carries more blood flow than fat, so for the same amount of the same compound absorption is generally faster and the peak concentration higher. It needs a needle long enough to pass through the overlying fat, so the syringe suited to one route is not automatically suited to the other.
Why it matters here
Route changes the shape of the exposure curve, so a pharmacokinetic figure on a record, such as time to peak or apparent half-life, is only meaningful alongside the route it was measured by.
What it is not
Intramuscular and Subcutaneous are not interchangeable readings of the same study: where a record's evidence comes from an intramuscular trial it is intramuscular evidence, and the rung describes the study as it was run. The abbreviations IM and IN are also a single letter apart and are misread in both directions when transcribed from study tables.
Also called
- intramuscular
- im
- im injection
IM is the standard abbreviation.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.