Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, Eric Christensen pharmacist.

And today, on this episode, I'm going to cover colostyramine. So colostiramine is a drug that is,

there's two major uses that I see in clinical practice. There's a couple other oddball ones, but this drug was

originally approved and indicated for its effects on lowering cholesterol. So that is one of the

primary indications for this medication, and it isn't used very often for cholesterol, strictly for the fact that we've got a lot

better agents, and it is notorious for drug interactions, which I'll obviously get into detail

later on in the podcast after the break. But remember that lipid lowering effect.

The other common indication that I see out in practice is patients with chronic diarrhea.

And I can't stress that enough.

You know, if you're a physician, a pharmacist, you know, nurse practitioner,

a nurse even helping out, recognize diarrhea symptoms

and understand that, you know, it's probably due to a condition or something going on.

It's not usual for a patient to have chronic diarrhea issues and not, you

don't have something else going on. However, with that said, there definitely have been patients

that, you know, that's their primary symptom and that's, you know, what they have and it doesn't

seem to be associated with anything else.

And so I have seen patients put on this medication for management of diarrhea or symptomatic treatment of chronic diarrhea. One other one that I maybe have seen once or twice as paritis

with colostasis.

Not terribly common that I've seen that, but maybe a couple times throughout my career.

Now how this drug works again, like I said, it was originally developed for cholesterol

management, the diarrhea management is off-label.

So mechanistically, to lower cholesterol, this drug creates a complex by binding with bile acid,

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