I hope everybody's having a great day. Today I'm Eric Christensen, pharmacist, and host of the real-life

pharmacology podcast. Today I'm going to cover cyclobenzaprine, which is a classic kind of older

medication that has a lot of kind of quirks, side effects, potential concerns that we certainly need to be aware of.

So a generic name being cyclobenzoprene, brand name being flexoril, as you may more

commonly hear it referred to as, its classification, basically a skeletal muscle relaxant.

So the way I remember this drug a little bit by its mechanism

is to understand that it does have structural similarities

to the tricyclic antidepressants.

So it being kind of an older drug

and maybe not studied that well,

it's not you know

maybe perfectly understood how the the drug has um c and skeletal muscle relaxant uh properties

um but there's some potential impact on a motor activity uh regarding um alpha and gamma motor neurons.

So again, that along with some of that structural activity with the TCA's,

you can think of anticholinergics as some of the potential side effects.

So let's talk about those a little bit.

So with anticholinergics, I've covered, I think,

one or two of them by now, but you can certainly scroll back through and look at the dozens of

podcasts already available. But you got to remember, spit, CP, and poop. So the patient cannot do these things. So it can cause some dry mouth. You can't spit. You can't see so it can cause some issues with glaucoma as well as dry eyes and things of that nature. You can't pee so it can cause urinary retention, particularly troublesome in patients with BPH. And constipation is a big, big issue as well.

Now, in my setting where I typically work with more geriatric patients, and generally, as we get

older, we may have more trouble with pain and different things of that nature as well sometimes.

This drug is not the greatest,

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