After four half-lives, what is the percentage of drug clearance?

Prepare for the StudentRDH Pharmacology Test. Utilize flashcards and multiple choice questions with hints and explanations. Ensure success in your exam!

The concept of half-lives is integral to understanding how drugs are cleared from the body. Each half-life represents the time required for the concentration of a drug in the bloodstream to reduce by half. When analyzing what happens after four half-lives, we can use exponential decay to compute the remaining percentage of the drug.

Starting with 100% of the drug, after the first half-life, 50% remains. After the second half-life, the remaining amount is halved again, resulting in 25%. Continuing this pattern:

  • After the third half-life, 12.5% remains.

  • After the fourth half-life, 6.25% remains.

Therefore, if 6.25% of the drug is still in the body, that translates to a clearance of 93.75%.

Thus, the correct understanding of how drug elimination works through multiple half-lives directly leads to the conclusion that after four half-lives, 93.75% of the drug has been cleared from the body, which directly supports the chosen answer.

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