Uses of pharmaco-EEG and pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling in the clinical scenario.

In order to place pharmaco-EEG within the clinical context, the distinction between biomarkers, surrogate endpoints, clinical endpoints and clinical outcomes is introduced. State-of-the-art applications of pharmaco-EEG, together with pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling in everyday clinical practice in anesthesiology (semilinear canonical correlation), psychiatry (discrimination between responders and nonresponders to pharmacological treatment using the test dose), neurology (antiepileptic field) and neurophysiology (first-order Markov model of sleep stage transitions) are discussed. The combination of both procedures, although successfully used during some drug development programs (opioids or benzodiazepines), is not widely applied in the clinical scenario where the central nervous system (CNS) is concerned. Much work is still need to develop fully the potentials that pharmaco-EEG together with pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling could bring to therapeutics in neuroscience.