Simplifying medicine dosing for children by harmonising weight bands across therapeutic areas

Abstract

Generally, dose recommendations for children are expressed as fixed dosing increments related to bodyweight, known as weight bands. The weight bands recommended in WHO treatment guidelines vary between diseases, leading to complexity and potential dosing errors when treating children for multiple diseases simultaneously. The introduction of a harmonised weight banding approach for orally administered drugs across disease areas could streamline dosing for young children, but implementing such an approach would require changes in current dosing recommendations. In this Health Policy, we describe the process we conducted to: identify therapeutic areas for harmonisation of weight bands; propose a harmonised weight-banding system to align with current use of weight bands in antibiotic guidance; and simulate the expected effect of dose adjustments due to weight-band harmonisation. Each step of this process, along with the effect and feasibility of weight-band harmonisation was discussed with clinical, policy, and pharmacology experts convened by WHO, representing four therapeutic areas: tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, and hepatitis C. Dosing according to harmonised weight bands across the targeted therapeutic areas was found to be feasible and should be considered for implementation by WHO disease programmes through their appropriate normative processes.