On today's episode of real-life pharmacology.com, I'm going to be covering acedaminophen.

Acetaminophen goes by the brand name of Tylenol.

It is one of the most common analgesics, one of the most common antipyretic or fever-reducing

medications that you'll see out there, used from pediatrics

on to geriatrics for the management of pain and fever primarily.

Now, the mechanism of action of acetaminophen is a little bit of a mystery, so to speak.

They've got some theories, some suspected mechanism of action.

It may be kind of a moderate inhibitor of prostaglandin synthesis.

It might kind of also act, you know, centrally in some way, shape, and form to block pain impulses.

Bottom line, I don't ever recall being asked the specific mechanism of action on an exam or anything like that

because it's not really, really well understood.

So I would say focus more so on acetyaminopin

being a fever-reducing agent that can certainly act on that, as well as relieve pain.

Now, when I compare Cedaminophen, I always compare it to n-seds. So, classic example being ibuprofen.

Both are available over-the-counter.

Patients have easy access to them.

And I think you definitely want to know the differences between acetaminophen and n-seds.

So one of the main differences, I would say is acetaminopin tends to be a little bit

easier on geriatric patients. So the nseds can, you know, cause kidney trouble, cause trouble with

heart failure, can cause trouble with GI bleeding. And acetaminopin doesn't really do that, certainly not to the extent at all, that Ns

do that.

So generally it's a little bit safer in most situations.

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