{"id":47379,"date":"2020-05-01T17:28:37","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T16:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=47379"},"modified":"2020-05-07T19:36:38","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T18:36:38","slug":"jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-change-and-decay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/05\/01\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-change-and-decay\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Change and decay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-32935\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"112\" height=\"138\" \/><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/04\/24\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-exponential-finances-increasing-decreasing\/\">Last week<\/a> I discussed the way in which the function e<sup>xt<\/sup> can result in curves that go up or down with time, depending on whether x is greater or less than 1. It also depends on what you\u2019re plotting. In the examples I gave I was plotting all new cases of an infection on any day, where the horizontal axis represented days.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But if instead of plotting new entries into the system, you\u2019re plotting what\u2019s left in the system as things disappear, you have to change the function slightly. Now it becomes e<sup>\u2013xt<\/sup>. A good example is radioactive decay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">After the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel at the end of 1895, and invention of the words radioactive and radioactivity by Pierre Curie and his wife Marie Sklodowska-Curie in 1898, it was soon discovered that that radioactivity decayed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-47383\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1pic.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"569\" height=\"366\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1pic.jpg 569w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1pic-300x193.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 569px) 100vw, 569px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The phenomenon of radioactive decay was observed by Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, who proposed that radioactivity was a process of spontaneous change of one element into another and modelled it mathematically as an exponential, according to what they called a law of radioactive change. Their method of calculation, which they described in a paper titled \u201cRadioactive change\u201d in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, is shown in the figure below.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-47384\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronsonmaypic.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"646\" height=\"648\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronsonmaypic.jpg 646w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronsonmaypic-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronsonmaypic-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronsonmaypic-640x642.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 646px) 100vw, 646px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">For any element, the value of \u03bb, the rate constant of decay, which has units of reciprocal days (day<sup>\u20131<\/sup>), i.e. a fraction per day, is constant. And since it is related to the half-life of the element (the time it takes for half of the element to decay to another element) by the following equation: rate constant = ln2\/half-life, the half-life for any element is also constant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, different radioactive elements decay at different rates, with a very wide range of values. Among naturally occurring radioactive elements the one with the shortest half-life, 23 yottoseconds (that\u2019s 23 \u00d7 10<sup>\u201324<\/sup> seconds) is hydrogen-7. And the one with the longest half-life, 2.2 yottayears (that\u2019s 2.2 \u00d7 10<sup>24<\/sup> years), is tellurium-128. Since this half-life is many trillion times the age of the universe, the estimated half-life of tellurium-128 comes with a health warning in the form of a confidence interval: 1.9\u20132.5 \u00d7 10<sup>24<\/sup> years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Figure 1 below shows the decay of two radioisotopes, <sup>131<\/sup>iodine and <sup>86<\/sup>rubidium.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-47381 alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"414\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1.jpg 400w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_1-290x300.jpg 290w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This type of decay applies in other areas. For example the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/electronicspani.com\/rise-and-decay-of-current-in-an-inductive-circuit\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">decay of a current<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in an electrical circuit is exponential and is described in exactly the same way as the decay of a radioactive isotope.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Similarly, the rate at which the amount of a drug in the body falls with time after administration is exponential. After one half-life 50% will be left in the body, after two half-lives 25%, after three half-lives 12.5% and so on. After 3.32 half-lives only 10% will be left. It is common therefore to say that most of the drug will have disappeared after four or five half-lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you give a medicine at regular intervals it will accumulate in the body over a period of time, provided that the dose you are giving is more than the amount that is lost during the dosage interval. For example, if a drug has a half-life of 24 hours, I could give 2 mg on the first day (a loading dose) and then 1 mg daily thereafter (a maintenance dose), exactly replacing the previous day\u2019s loss. But if I give more than 1 mg every day the amount of drug will increase day by day. Eventually, however, the rate of loss from the body will balance the daily dose and a steady state will ensue. If D<sub>L<\/sub> is the loading dose and D<sub>M<\/sub> is the maintenance dose at steady state, the amount lost during a dosage interval is the difference between the two and is also the amount lost by exponential decay. Thus, D<sub>L<\/sub> \u2013 D<sub>M<\/sub> = D<sub>L<\/sub> e<sup>\u2013\u03bbt<\/sup> and therefore D<sub>M<\/sub> = D<sub>L<\/sub>(1 \u2013 e<sup>\u2013\u03bbt<\/sup>).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This perhaps surprising result implies that the time it takes to reach this steady state also depends on the half-life of the drug in the body. You get halfway there in one half-life, 75% of the way in two half-lives, and so on. Hence it is common to say that a steady state is reached in 4\u20135 half-lives. Actually, that gets you about 94\u201397% of the way. Near enough steady state.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here\u2019s a graph of the changes in the retail price index during the banking crisis of 2008\u20139. I suspect that our economy is currently undergoing a similar change. And it\u2019s exponential.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-47382 alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"598\" height=\"394\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_2.jpg 598w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may_2-300x198.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 598px) 100vw, 598px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em><strong>Jeffrey Aronson<\/strong>\u00a0is a clinical pharmacologist, working in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford&#8217;s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Competing interests:<\/strong> None declared.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-47396\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"706\" height=\"1622\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain.jpg 706w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain-131x300.jpg 131w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain-446x1024.jpg 446w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain-669x1536.jpg 669w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2020\/05\/aronson_may1_integeragain-640x1470.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 706px) 100vw, 706px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I discussed the way in which the function ext can result in curves that go up or down with time, depending on whether x is greater or less [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/05\/01\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-change-and-decay\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5762],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jeff-aronsons-words"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . 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