Dosing and scheduling
Pulsatile Dosing
Last updated
Dosing arranged to produce short bursts of a compound with clear gaps between them, rather than a level amount held steady. The reasoning is that several of the body's own hormones are released in bursts, and that the receptors involved respond to the pattern as well as to the amount. It is a claim about the shape of exposure over time, not about the total.
Why it matters here
If a compound's target really does respond to bursts, then holding a flat level can blunt the response rather than strengthen it, which makes steady state an unhelpful goal for that compound. This is one of the few places where the schedule itself, rather than the amount, is doing the work.
What it is not
Pulsatile dosing is not just infrequent dosing. A long-lasting compound taken rarely still sits in the body between doses and produces no pulses at all, because the pattern depends on how quickly the compound disappears rather than on how far apart the doses are.
Also called
- pulsatile dosing
- pulsatile
- pulsitile
- pulsative
- pulsed
- pulsed dosing
- pulse dosing
- pulsing
- pulses
- mimicking natural pulses
- natural pulse
People often describe this as mimicking the natural pulse, borrowing from the way growth hormone is released in bursts. Whether a particular compound reproduces that pattern is a separate question from whether the phrase gets used about it.
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.