EDIT: For specificity, I’m on buspirone 7.5mg twice daily, but often miss a dose (unintentionally of course, life happens). When this happens, I’ll usually double up, even knowing I’m not “supposed” to, in order to stay on schedule.
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Yes there can be.
For a drug to work it has to be absorbed into the system. If it is already active it will work, if not the body will need to ketabize it to activate it. The body will then work on excretion the drug, which may involve more metabolism. Each of these steps takes time, there is some variance from person to person, but we know the average time that a person will take to metabolize a drug.
For a drug to work, the levels it reaches in your body must be in a particular range. This is called the therapeutic window. Too low, and it won’t have an effect. Too high and you risk side effects and toxicity.
Dose strength and frequency is worked out so that you will spend the most time with the drug levels in the therapeutic window, and have less risk of the levels going too high, or not high enough. You have to account for much and how quickly the body can absorb it. How easily it is distributed around the body and passes into the target cells. How quickly it metabolizes it and how it is excreted. Each of these stages is taken into account for the average person when dose and frequency recommendations are worked out.
So yes, changing the dose and frequency can alter the effects a drug has, even if the total dose in 24 hours is the same overall.
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