Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist Eric Christensen.

And today I'm going to be covering buzperone, which the brand name of this medication is Busebar.

It's generic kind of classification is an anti-anxiety type medication and I would say in clinical practice

that's probably the most common reason you're going to see this medication

utilized on occasion I rarely have seen it used for depression as far as

augmentation and using it with other antidepressant

agents in patients who are struggling to get those symptoms under control. But I would say that's

pretty rare there in general. So with busperone, the mechanism of action is really not totally well understood as far as

its role in managing and helping anxiety symptoms. Now there is some theories, some suggested

mechanism of actions that we might think that this medication

works through. So when you think of a medication that might work for depression, might work

for anxiety, we probably think of serotonergic activity. So that's one of the main mechanisms

that are educated guess guess or best guess,

is that it is a partial agonist at 5HT1 receptors, potentially 5HT2 as well. So having that agonist,

stimulating type activity, you might hypothesize that's the reason

why we may see some anti-anxiety, anti-depressant type benefit with this medication.

Now there is one other suggested mechanism that it does have some mild dopamine blocking activity.

So I'll talk about that a little bit as far as adverse effect profile and kind of a rare situation that you may come up against.

With dosing, I think one of the bigger downsides with buzprone is that it's got a very short half-life.

And so this medication is dose generally two to three times per day.

So in patients where you've got difficulty with adherence,

maybe a very busy schedule, that type of thing,

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