Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pharmacology

Finding "undocumented" compounds

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this.

I've seen a lot of pharmacology navboxes (such as muscarinic receptor modulators, for an example), lots of them contain a lot of drugs that are not really known (a lot of them are redlinks), which is what I mean by "undocumented compounds"

I was just curious if anyone knew how to find names of these compounds (like specific keywords in a search engine)

Because so far I've been creating a lot of articles that were redlinks on the navboxes, but I'd love to add new compounds to said templates.

So if anyone knew how to find lists (or something similar) with names of investigational drugs (names like "ADX-71441") that would be really great Themonkey942 (talk) 22:29, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Importance ratings need review

An editor first labeled Legality of cannabis as top-importance for this group, and after I removed the rating, has changed it to high-importance. Please decide for yourselves how you'd like to have it assessed.

I've seen a couple of editors "upgrade" their favorite subjects, perhaps in the mistaken belief that this will result in more editors working on the articles. I specifically suggest taking a look at what's in Category:Top-importance pharmacology articles and Category:High-importance pharmacology articles in particular, to see whether any spammers have been at work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:41, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Dose and dosage

Is there a good, well-sourced page that describes the technical difference between dose and dosage? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Apparently we did not have such an article, but I created dosage (pharmacology) which hopefully is a start. Boghog (talk) 18:58, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for creating that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:41, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps dosage (pharmacology) should be merged into Medical prescription. Thoughts? Boghog (talk) 19:48, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm inclined not to make a hasty decision (either way). Part of this is because I generally prefer merging, but other people tell me that a short, focused article is better for mobile users (which is most of our page views).

I did some copyediting on Dose (biochemistry). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:27, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

In my opinion, a dosage and a prescription are two different (albeit related, of course) things. I'd be inclined not to merge, for that reason. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:44, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

My view is that they are synonyms, and, with respect ot Boghog for work done, I don't think that we need that new page. Indeed, my reading of the key source in that new article is not consistent with the definition in the lede. Rowbotham et al (2019) actually say we found dose and dosage to be used interchangeably. We recommend a distinction between these terms, with ‘dosage’ having the advantage of capturing change to amount ‘dispensed’ over time (in response to effects achieved). Dosage therefore acknowledges the inevitable dynamic and complexity of implementation. So, the current state is that they are synonyms; their recommended use is a very subtle one that doesn't reflect the lede of the current article. My own UK-centric view is that dosage is an abomination that should be eliminated wherever it rears its ugly head, and that the term dose suffices for all civilized discussion. Given that bias, I suggest merging Dosage (pharmacology) to Dose (biochemistry), describing any differences in use on that page. Klbrain (talk) 21:56, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Dorland's (2007) gives these definitions:

dosage

the determination and regulation of the size, frequency, and number of doses.

dose

quantity to be administered at one time, such as a specified amount of medication.

The latter continues for three-quarters of a page to cover all the sub-definitions (e.g., total dose, daily dose, median effective dose...), but they don't use them as synonyms. That said, even though there is a verifiable technical distinction between the two, I think we could still merge the articles. It is not unusual for an article to have a note about the technical distinction between two words, especially when that distinction is more often ignored outside of technical documents. And to go even further than Klbrain, we might want to consider using the plain old English word amount when appropriate, for even greater clarity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:44, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

See also Collins: dosage and Collins: dose. My understanding of the two terms matches what has been written in the Wikipedia articles. I suggest changing "given at one time" to "given at any one time" in case anyone thinks dose only refers to a one-off consumption. And that definition seems to match what Collins says is the British English use, as far as medicine is concerned. However, the US English use (citing Websters and their own definition in two sections) suggests some ambiguity with "the amount used in a dose" and "the amount of medicine to be given". At first this seems to indicate Americans are sometimes using "dosage" where they should say "dose" but then I considered what "amount" means, and it is cumulative.

WAID mentions both "total dose" and "daily dose" which are different from an individual dose. A medicine of 100mg taken three times a day for two days has an individual dose of 100mg, daily dose of 300mg and total dose of 600mg. In each case the word dose is used, not dosage, though we might qualify use of the word that isn't referring to the individual dose if that isn't clear. Sometimes the word on its own can refer to the quantity consumed daily or in total. For example, if someone suffered ill effects from being on "too high a dose" of a medicine, this could be because they are taking it four times a day rather than two. If someone died from being given a "huge dose" of a medicine, this could be because the dose consumed over three days was ultimately fatal, whereas one individual dose might not. This all says to me that dose can be used to refer to an accumulation. The worse "dosage" couldn't be used for that at all.

So perhaps in addition to "at any one time" (the individual dose) we could say "or in total over a period" (the daily dose or total dose). The American English usages in Collins would permit that definition. Have we got a source that say so more explicitly? -- Colin°^Talk 08:00, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I see that in Dose (biochemistry)#Vaccines it says "Vaccinations are typically administered as liquids and dosed in milliliters" Clearly this isn't millilitres of vaccine. For example this Covid vaccine is a 0.3ml dose containing 30 micrograms of the vaccine. A liquid medicine such as Epilim liquid is 200mg/5ml. The dose in that case might refer to 400mg twice a day or 10ml twice a day or most precisely as 400mg as 10ml twice a day. One doesn't care about the size of a pill, though one might need to take two pills if the dose requires it.

As the lead of of Dose (biochemistry) says, it can refer to the taking of some unit of medicine without anyone giving a size in mg or ml. For example this government report says "Up to 23 August 2022, 53 million people received a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, 50 million received a second dose and 40 million received a third or booster dose."

I wonder if the dose article could say more about how sometimes dose references the quantity of the containing liquid or pills rather than the amount of medicinal compound. "Take two paracetamol". "Draw up 0.3ml of covid vaccine from the vial". "Take 30ml of cough medicine". -- Colin°^Talk 08:30, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I think that Dose (biochemistry), though not even close to our worst articles, is sufficiently weak that any editor who's looked in a dictionary/has a basic grasp of the concept could improve it through a quick copyedit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Mephedrone

Mephedrone has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 16:10, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

External links in list articles

I noticed the new list of investigational autism and pervasive developmental disorder drugs today, which is one of many articles submitted via AfC by the prolific IP editor 76.174.0.57. The list is clearly worthwhile but I do note that it has 89 external links in its main sections and only three actual references. This seems to go against the guidance at WP:ELLIST but is common in similar lists of interest to the Pharmacology Project. Some of the external links may be totally unnecessary, since there are valid wikilinks to existing articles where reference sources can be found. In other cases, it might be better to convert the EL to cites. Is this worth discussion and agreement on a consistent approach? Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Fine for the links to be turned into refs. It's mostly just that it's too overwhelming to do it myself. Especially considering that the lists require regular updating, which usually entails remaking them from scratch. Ideally turning the refs into links would be automated via a batch method somehow. But I'm not aware of a tool for that. (Perhaps User:Boghog might, since I see them templating a lot of bare URLs?) I will admit that it is also significantly easier to check the status of the drugs (e.g., many at once) when the cites are formatted as external links rather than as refs though. But if Wikipedia policy dictates that they should be formatted as refs then that's how they should be. – 76.174.0.57 (talk) 21:45, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I went ahead and converted the external links into citation tags. Although this might make them slightly harder to follow, templated citations could be useful when turning the red drug links into stubs. For anyone interested, pasting the following RegEx into the "search and replace" function of Wikipedia’s editing toolbar will convert the external links into refs containing bare URLs:

Search for: \[https(.*?)\]

Replace with: <ref>https\1</ref>

In a second step, the WP:reFill (link) tool will convert the bare URLs into {{cite web}} templates. Boghog (talk) 06:51, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

@Boghog Thanks for teaching me something new and useful! I'm going to apply that technique to the other lists I linked above. Two comments: 1) the search string needs to be \[http(.*?)\] in older articles using http rather than https and 2) you had a typo in your replace string, which should be <ref>https$1</ref> Had me fooled for a moment! Mike Turnbull (talk) 13:24, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

@Mike Turnbul I forgot about non-secure URLs. Good catch. Alternatively, the search regex could be modified to \[https?(.*?)\]. "s?" will match zero or one occurrence of "s", and hence will match both "http" and "https". The back reference designation for most regex parsers I am familiar with is "\1" which worked when I tested it. When I tried "$1", instead of inserting the captured URL, it inserted literally "$1". So I am a bit confused by your second statement. Boghog (talk) 13:59, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

@Boghog I've had little experience with regex searches but when I tried your original "\1" version this was the diff, which I reverted as it had added the "\" into the output. I then looked at the table in Regular_expression#Examples, where the second row on bracketed groups says that $1 can be used "later" to refer to the matched pattern. I then used the $ version successfully. My instinct is always to do the experiment and when something works I rarely worry about why it did! That entry in the table does say that some implementations use "\1". Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:41, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Such a simple solution. Thanks Boghog and Mike Turnbull. Saved an otherwise huge amount of work. – 76.174.0.57 (talk) 21:08, 29 October 2024 (UTC)