In physiology and medicine, the body surface area (BSA) is the measured or calculated surface of a human body. For many clinical purposes BSA is a better indicator of metabolic mass than body weight because it is less affected by abnormal adipose mass. Nevertheless, there have been several important critiques of the use of BSA in determining the dosage of medications with a narrow therapeutic index like many chemotherapy medications. Typically there is a 4-10 fold variation in cytotoxic drug clearance between individuals due to differing activity of drug elimination processes related to genetic and environmental factors. This can lead to significant overdosing and even more perniciously to underdosing (and increased risk of cancer recurrence). It is also thought to be a distorting factor in Phase I and II trials that may result in potentially helpful medications being prematurely rejected. The trend to personalized medicine is one approach to counter this weakness. Estimation of BSA is simpler than many measures of volume.
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Famous quotes containing the words body, surface and/or area:
““... Can poet’s thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish’s scale,
Be mimicry?””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)