Azithromycin Pharmacology

Real Life Pharmacology - Pharmacology Education for Health Care Professionals

Eric Christianson, PharmD; Pharmacology Expert and Clinical Pharmacist

Education, Health & Fitness, Medicine

5 • 716 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode, I cover azithromycin pharmacology. This drug primarily acts by inhibiting protein synthesis. It binds to the 50s ribosomal subunit.

GI adverse effects like nausea and diarrhea are going to be the most common with azithromycin.

Azithromycin has been associated with prolonging the QT interval. Drugs like amiodarone, ondansetron, citalopram, antipsychotics, and quinolone antibiotics can also prolong the QT interval.

One major advantage that azithromycin has over other antibiotics is that it has a long half life which allows for once daily dosing.

Azithromycin has numerous uses like pneumonia, MAC, alternative for ear infections in patients with a beta-lactam allergy, certain STD's, and also is rarely used in long term COPD exacerbation prevention.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology Podcast. I'm Eric Christensen, pharmacist, and your host.
0:06.3	Today I'm going to be covering azithromycin. First, I wanted to cover a question. I get once in a while.
0:14.0	So the free top 200 PDF, 31 page PDF can be found at real-life pharmacology.com.
0:23.4	Cover the top 200 drugs and really important pearls associated with those drugs.
0:31.1	And those pearls are often highly tested on pharmacology exams, board exams, and things
0:37.4	like that. So that's what that
0:39.1	resource is all about. I've had that question a couple times now. I get it free simply for following
0:43.8	the blog. I'll give you email updates as to when I've got a new podcast released is primarily
0:50.9	what I use your email for.
0:54.5	And of course, nothing else in that respect.
0:57.5	So real-life pharmacology.com, you can get that.
1:01.2	Let's get into azithromycin, what you came here to listen for.
1:06.0	So this drug is an antibiotic for infection at its most basic level.
1:11.4	The mechanism of action of this drug is that it binds to the 50s ribosomal subunit.
1:18.6	And in that process, ultimately what the drug does is it blocks bacteria from creating, from producing protein, also called protein biosynthesis.
1:33.1	So what that does is stops the bacteria from growing, from replicating,
1:39.4	and basically getting those essential proteins that it needs.
1:45.1	And that's a good thing if we're trying to treat bacteria.
1:48.9	Now the uses of this medication are many.
1:52.9	There's numerous, numerous infections.
1:54.9	I'm not going to cover all of them by any means,
1:57.9	but I definitely throw out some common things that you see in clinical practice.
	...

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