Posted by europerep on July 4, 2014, at 12:20:19
In reply to generics can vary up to 45%, posted by Phil on July 3, 2014, at 14:32:04
But 45% of what? tmax? Cmax? Area under the curve? etc...
Whether a generic product is pharmacologically identical to the brand product only really matters when you take the brand product while it's still patented, and then you switch when generics are released. If you get started on a generic right away, it doesn't really matter if it slightly differs from the brand product. (Unless of course it's a fucked up formulation that leads to much lower bioavailability or something like that.)
What matters more to me is that a product, generic or brand, is "internally" consistent, i.e. that one capsule or tablet contains the exact same amount of the drug as another one. I am currently switching from one amitriptyline product to another, because the first started to produce inconsistent results (at a time when a range of other products of the same company were recalled for precisely that problem: unstable content of active ingredient). The new product works as well as the old one did before I started to notice unstable results a few months ago, so I am pretty sure that there was something wrong with the last batch I got.
poster:europerep
thread:1067865
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140609/msgs/1067894.html