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Albert D. Fraser, PhD
Dalhousie University Victoria General Hospital Halifax, Canada

JAMA. 1989;261(13):1879.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor. —

In the article by Dr Dole¹ in the November 25 issue of JAMA, it was stated that clinical success in the rehabilitation of heroin addicts requires stabilization of the blood level of methadone in a pharmacologically effective range (150 to 600 ng/mL).

Other investigators have studied plasma concentrations of methadone and have attempted to establish whether a threshold serum concentration or therapeutic window exists for methadone in the treatment of opiate dependency.^2-7 All these studies measured the total serum concentration of methadone (protein-bound fraction and free fraction). Olsen⁸ studied the binding of tritiated l-methadone with solutions of purified human -globulin and human plasma. -Globulin bound 13% to 17.5% of the methadone and human plasma bound 83.7% to 87.3%. Since the maximum albumin binding was 43.8%, the author thought that other proteins probably bound methadone as well.

Romach et al⁹ reported the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West).

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