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.
Read more about Body Surface Area: Uses, Calculation, Average Values
Famous quotes containing the words body, surface and/or area:
“No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“... nothing is more human than substituting the quantity of words and actions for their character. But using imprecise words is very similar to using lots of words, for the more imprecise a word is, the greater the area it covers.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)