Large errors in the estimation of volume of distribution (Vd) for sparse data
Dear all,
I have some population PK data which are in general very sparse (95% have only
1 blood sample between 2 successive doses). I developed a population PK model
with the one-compartment model with 1st order absorption. The progress is
generally okay except that whenever a random effect, i.e. *(1+ETA(1)), is used
to describe distribution of Vd, OMEGA would be estimated to be very large
(around 45% in terms of CV, with 80% Shrinkage), despite statistical
significance (dOF approx. -5.5). So I dropped the random effect and expressed
Vd in terms of a single fixed effect. When the final model has come out, I
performed bootstrap and found that most estimates are accurate except Vd, which
has a very large standard error and bias (mean 232, bias 49, SE 156), while the
estimates for CL and other parameters look normal. I then constructed the
predictive plots for the developed model using both the original estimates
(i.e. estimates using my original dataset) (#1) and estimates from one of the
bootstrap runs which has an extreme estimate of Vd (9xx) (#2), and found out
that the two plots of plasma profiles are quite different in terms of the shape
(#1 is "taller", #2 is much flatter) but have similar average Cp.
These seem to be suggesting that given my sparse data, it is impossible to
require accurate estimations of both CL and Vd. Apart from fixing Vd to a fixed
value, is there any other possible solutions? Or is there anything that I might
have overlooked?
Thanks and regards,
Matthew