Data Mining

Users of rxkinetics.net have been contributing to a large data set for the past three years. The web app has been saving anonymous data from serum level analysis during this time. See this blog post: The BBVM project part II.

It is important to state up front that there is no quality control over this anonymous data. Some of it could have been entered incorrectly. Also there is no way to know how much is real patient data versus someone experimenting with the web app.

The other problem with this type of data collection is that many don’t “run the numbers” when the results are within target range. Therefore, outliers tend to become more prominent in the data set.

With those caveats in mind, let’s examine the data.

All BMI < 19 BMI 19-30 BMI > 30
Total 2937 180 1808 939
Male 1686 89 1074 523
Female 1251 91 734 416

Let’s delve into the statistics from the two largest groups.

BMI 19-30

Descriptive stats

Age BMI CrCl Vd L/kg TBW VD L/kg ABW
Min 15 19.04 8.0 0.38 0.38
Max 100 30.04 120 0.92 1.21
Mean 60.6 24.8 77.3 0.67 0.72
Median 63 24.6 72.0 0.69 0.73
Mode 65 23.2 120 0.70 0.70
S.D. 18.48 2.96 30.97 0.09 0.11

The raw Vd histogram follows a normal distribution (as a large sample should).
Vd_Raw

But the histogram for Vd L/kg total body weight (TBW) has a noticeable negative (left) skew.
Vd_TBW

Because Vancomycin does not distribute well into adipose tissue let’s look at Vd L/kg of adjusted body weight (ABW), where ABW = LBW + 40% of the difference between TBW and LBW (i.e., the weight we used to dose Vancomycin “back in the old days”).
Vd_Adj_BW

The histogram of Vd L/kg ABW is noticeably more normal than TBW (but not ideal).

Regression of CL vs CrCl results in a higher r^2 value when we use Normalized CrCl vs LBW-based CrCl, 0.528 vs 0.524. (CrCl Methods explained)
Clearance_vs_LBW_CrCl

Clearance_vs_NormCrCl

BMI > 30

Descriptive stats

Age BMI CrCl Vd L/kg TBW VD L/kg ABW
Min 17 30.1 10 0.37 0.45
Max 95 77.7 120 0.91 1.40
Mean 59.2 37.9 73.6 0.67 0.89
Median 60 35.4 71 0.69 0.89
Mode 57 32.4 120 0.70 0.59
S.D. 15.59 8.08 30.41 0.11 0.16

As with the previous group, in obese patients the histogram for Vd L/kg of ABW has a more normal distribution than TBW.

Large_Vd_Raw

Large_Vd_TBW

Large_Vd_ABW

The r^2 improvement is even greater in obese patients when using normalized CrCl for the Kel regression, 0.533 vs 0.412.

Large_Clearance_vs_LBW_CrCl

Large_Clearance_vs_NormCrCl

Summary
Again, since the data is not verified this analysis is debatable. However it does pose a couple of questions:

  • Should we use adjusted body weight when modeling Vancomycin volume of distribution?
  • Should we use normalized creatinine clearance when modeling Vancomycin elimination rate?

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