Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Half-life (symbol t½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential (or, rarely ...
Biological half-life (elimination half-life, pharmacological half-life) is the time taken for concentration of a biological substance (such as a medication) to decrease from its maximum concentration (C max) to half of C max in the blood plasma. [1][2][3][4][5] It is denoted by the abbreviation . [2][4] This is used to measure the removal of ...
Exponential decay. A quantity undergoing exponential decay. Larger decay constants make the quantity vanish much more rapidly. This plot shows decay for decay constant (λ) of 25, 5, 1, 1/5, and 1/25 for x from 0 to 5. A quantity is subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its current value.
Specific activity. Specific activity (symbol a) is the activity per unit mass of a radionuclide and is a physical property of that radionuclide. [1][2] It is usually given in units of becquerel per kilogram (Bq/kg), but another commonly used unit of specific activity is the curie per gram (Ci/g). In the context of radioactivity, activity or ...
Effective half-life. In pharmacokinetics, the effective half-life is the rate of accumulation or elimination of a biochemical or pharmacological substance in an organism; it is the analogue of biological half-life when the kinetics are governed by multiple independent mechanisms. This is seen when there are multiple mechanisms of elimination ...
Clearance (pharmacology) In pharmacology, clearance ( ) is a pharmacokinetic parameter representing the efficiency of drug elimination. This is the rate of elimination of a substance divided by its concentration. [1] The parameter also indicates the theoretical volume of plasma from which a substance would be completely removed per unit time.
The half-life of a radioactive isotope (usually denoted by t 1/2) is a more familiar concept than the mean-life, so although the equations above are expressed in terms of the mean-life, it is more usual to quote the value of 14 C 's half-life than its mean-life. The currently accepted value for the half-life of 14 C is 5,700 ± 30 years. [21]
Decay correction is one way of working out what the radioactivity would have been at the time it was taken, rather than at the time it was tested. For example, the isotope copper-64, commonly used in medical research, has a half-life of 12.7 hours. If you inject a large group of animals at "time zero", but measure the radioactivity in their ...