Hey, all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Derek Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. As always, go check out Real Life Pharmacology.com. We've got your free 31 page PDF.

It's a little study guide I put together on the top 200 drugs. It's a great no-brainer.

If you're going through pharmacology classes or just need a little

refresher and you're out in regular practice. So go take advantage of that, simply an email. We'll get

you access to that, no charge to you at all. So with that said, let's get into the drug of the day

today. And that is a camprosate.

Brand name in this medication is campril, and this medication is used for alcohol use disorder.

So basically trying to reduce intake of alcohol in people that have struggled with that issue.

So this medication mechanistically works by basically stimulating or increasing GABA effects

and or reducing glutamate effects.

So if you remember, GABA is kind of that suppressing central nervous system molecule.

And glutamate is more of an excitatory neurotransmitter.

So GABA agonist action would obviously kind of drop down or blunt that central nervous system.

And then glutamate antagonist activity would also work to blunt kind of that central nervous system by blocking that excitatory neurotransmitter.

Now, how exactly this all works and this mechanism works in alcohol use disorder isn't well defined,

but that's essentially what the medication does in general.

So again, mechanism of action, not that well understood,

but certainly has been shown in studies to help maintain alcohol abstinence.

It is important to note, so with alcohol use disorder historically, many, many years ago,

we used to use dysulfram a little bit more, and basically that would cause a reaction if they

patient drank alcohol, so basically a negative feedback type situation where the patients would feel terrible if they

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