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Research

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's ItôFormer Published Research Paper
01

ItôFormer: Augmenting Stochastic Validity in Financial-centric Deep Neural Networks

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6742840

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Tokenization and Transformer Architectures Published Research Paper
02

Tokenization and Transformer Architectures for Cross-Asset Allocation: Controlled Ablation in Financial Time Series

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934938

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Neural Portfolio Allocators Published Research Paper
03

Neural Portfolio Allocators: Cross-Asset Optimization Strategies with Attention-Based Transformers and Multi-Agents

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5447734

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics Published Research Paper
04

Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics: Clinical v. Anecdotal Data (LGD-4033) Why Dosage Is Not the Same as Exposure!

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934521

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Quantamental Portfolio Allocators Published Research Paper
05

Quantamental Portfolio Allocators: Deriving Alpha from Fundamental Metrics with ML

DOI: doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934778

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Research / Publication SSRN / ONLINE JOURNAL
View at SSRN Elsevier

Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics: Clinical v. Anecdotal Data (LGD-4033)

Abstract

Whether you take medication daily for a diagnosis or are simply recovering from an illness, have you ever considered how long that medication remains active in your bloodstream? When does it peak, and when does it begin wearing off? As someone who takes ADHD medication every day, I'm fairly confident that most of us are, on some level, conscious of how long our medication remains at maximum effectiveness. Yet the ability to detect a medication physiologically is far less common for the majority of prescribed substances.

Recently, these questions led me to quantify the effects of compound half-life and time decay in the bloodstream. Why is this important? Consider a scenario in which you are instructed to take a prescription once daily. Suppose the compound has a half-life of 24–36 hours and remains at relatively stable concentrations in the bloodstream during that period. If you take (say) 1 mg on day one, then take another 1 mg twenty-four hours later, the amount remaining in your system causes your effective exposure to exceed the prescribed dose. As I will show, a half-life of 24–36 hours corresponds to an accumulation factor of approximately 2.0× to 2.7×, meaning that repeated daily dosing can produce substantially higher exposure than many people intuitively expect.

Although the difference between 1 mg and 2 mg may seem negligible, the accumulation factor under linear kinetics does not change with dose. Simply put, the same 2.0× to 2.7× accumulation multiple that applies to a 1 mg dose also applies to a 10 mg dose. Under idealized conditions, a daily 10 mg dose could therefore correspond to an effective exposure closer to 20–27 mg once steady state is reached. In reality, exposure varies across individuals due to differences in metabolism and elimination rates. As a result, the model developed in this paper explicitly incorporates peak-to-trough variation and nonlinear accumulation dynamics. Using LGD-4033 as a case study, this paper demonstrates how nonlinear accumulation can cause exposure to diverge substantially from nominal dose, particularly when half-life exceeds the dosing interval.

Keywords

Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, SARM, Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator, SERM, Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulator, Anabolic, Androgenic, Prohormone, Steroid, PED, Performance Enhancing Drug, PK–PD Modeling, Nonlinear Dynamics, Exposure–Response Modeling, Monte Carlo Simulation, Uncertainty Quantification, Dose–Response Relationships, Drug Accumulation, Mathematical Modeling, Computational Pharmacology, LGD-4033, Ligandrol, Systems Pharmacology, Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs), Testosterone Suppression, Metabolism, Kinetics, Chemistry, Heterogeneity, Endocrine System, Testosterone, Hormone Imbalance, Physiological System, Biochemistry, Biomedical Engineering

JEL Classification

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Suggested Citation

Coulter, Nathaniel, Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics: Clinical v. Anecdotal Data (LGD-4033): Why Dosage Is Not the Same as Exposure! (January 28, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6934521 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934521

Repository

github.com/Nathaniel-Coulter/Pharmacokinetics

Declaration of Interest

The author declares no competing financial interests, commercial affiliations, or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Ethics Approval

This study did not involve human subjects research, clinical interventions, patient recruitment, or access to protected health information. All clinical data were obtained from publicly available published literature, and anecdotal observations were derived from publicly available self-reported sources that were anonymized and analyzed in aggregate for educational and research purposes. Accordingly, institutional review board (IRB) approval was not required.

Funder Statement

This research received no external funding and was conducted independently by the author.

License Information

SSRN

The copyright holder has granted SSRN a license. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.

GitHub

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Nathaniel Coulter

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