Hey all, thanks for listening. Welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host,

Eric Christensen, pharmacist, and we have got a heavy hitter for a drug today, drug called

Carbamazepine, and there is a ton of clinical pearls with this medication. So we'll just get right

into it. Brand name of this medication is

Tegretol, and its mechanism isn't totally well understood, and there's multiple possible mechanisms.

I would say the one that's most commonly associated with the use of this drug is it binds

sodium channels and alters sodium transfer across cell membranes,

which can ultimately slow down, prevent action potentials from happening and synapses and things like that.

So kind of a little bit more of a challenging medication as far as the mechanism goes because there is

kind of so much ambiguity and it works in the brain which makes things more difficult to research

and understand but that sodium channel aspect does seem to be important other things that

it can potentially cause can stimulate the release

of ADHD, so we'll talk about that a little bit in the adverse effect profile. Mildly

anti-cholonergic as well, I would say in the grand scheme of things that probably isn't

a huge, huge deal, because there are so many different side effects and boxed warnings

with this medication.

Now, getting into the uses in my clinical practice, probably the three most common I've seen

tegratol or carbamazepine used for is seizures, bipolar disorder, and trigeminal neuralgia.

And it's really a messy, messy drug as far as lots of drug interactions, which I'll cover.

So that's really why you don't see a lot of providers using this medication because there's so much

monitoring and potential for hazards along the way with this medication.

But obviously in a situation like seizures, bipolar disorder, or trigeminal neuralgia,

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