External validation of population pharmacokinetic models of vancomycin in postoperative neurosurgical patients.

objectiveVancomycin is commonly used in the prevention and treatment of intracranial infections in postoperative neurosurgical patients with narrow therapeutic window and large pharmacokinetic variations. Several population pharmacokinetic (PPK) models of vancomycin have been established for neurosurgical patients. But comprehensive external evaluation has not been performed for almost all models. The objective of this study was to evaluate the predictive ability of published vancomycin PPK models in adult postoperative neurosurgical patients using an independent dataset.

methodPubMed, Embase and China National Knowledge Internet databases were searched to identify published vancomycin PPK models in adult postoperative neurosurgical patients. Prediction-based and simulation-based diagnostics were used to evaluate model predictability. Bayesian forecasting was used to assess the influence of prior concentration on model prediction performance.

resultA total of 763 vancomycin plasma concentrations from 493 postoperative neurosurgical patients were included in the external dataset. Eight population pharmacokinetic models of vancomycin in postoperative neurosurgical patients were included and evaluated. The model by Zhang et al. exhibited the best predictive performance in prediction-based diagnostics and prediction-corrected visual predictive checks, followed by the model by Shen et al. The predictive performance of other models was not satisfactory. The normalized predictive distribution error test shows that none of the models is suitable to describe our data. The predictive performance of vancomycin models was obviously improved by maximum a posteriori Bayesian forecasting.

conclusionThe published PPK models for adult postoperative neurosurgical patients show extensive variation in predictive performance in our patients. Although it is challenging to recommend initial doses of vancomycin from these predictive models, the combination of model-based prediction and therapeutic drug monitoring can be used for dose optimization.