Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast.

I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

And today on the episode, I am going to cover Ben Stroping,

which the brand name for that medication is Cogentin.

Now, it's not a medication that's used incredibly often,

and at least in my practice, in my experience,

the most common situation I've seen it used for is drug-induced extraparaminal symptoms.

And the most common class of medications that cause these adverse effects are antipsychotics.

So these can be, you know, antipsychotics and obviously be super helpful in patients with

schizophrenia, for example, in reducing, you know, psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, things of that nature. However, they can

cause these movement adverse effects, which are called extra pyramidal symptoms. And so Benstropine

can be used to help manage this adverse effect. Now I do want to caution that the drug is not really

intended to be used for prophylaxis. So for instance, we don't give, you know,

risperidone and automatically give benzopine with it. We actually wait generally for these

patients to develop these adverse effects, and sometimes they don't have extra-paraminal symptoms,

but in the event that a patient is really, really responsive to the antipsychotic.

And we have maybe tried alternative agents,

and they're having these troublesome extraparaminal symptoms,

but we feel that the benefit of keeping it on board is actually worth it for the patient

in just managing those side effects.

So that's where

Benstropine I've seen it used most in that setting. Important differentiation, it is not recommended

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