Welcome back to the real life pharmacology podcast. Thanks again for all the support. The growth has been

tremendous in the podcast. And that's simply due to you guys sharing with classmates,

fellow health care professionals. And hopefully I continue to provide some good, relevant, useful real-world information.

So today we're going to cover gabapentin and pre-gabalin.

Now, these two drugs in clinical practice, they have very similar responses, clinical responses.

As far as adverse effect profile, we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about mechanism of a little bit.

Drug interactions, these drugs tend to not have a ton of drug interactions, so that's great.

One thing up front I certainly did want to mention, was cost.

Gabapentin is much less expensive than pre-gabalin, at least at this time in 2018 here.

You know, as time goes on, and hopefully pre-gabalin becomes generic,

for that cost will go down but at this time

um in most clinical situations you are going to absolutely see gabapentin um used first and that's simply

due to the the cost factor there but we'll talk a little bit about the the kinetics and different things

there too.

So starting off on the mechanism of action, it's often thought, and you look at the name of the

drugs pre-Gabalin and gabapentin, and you think about GABA is kind of initially what you

think about. And I believe initially,

don't quote me on this, but I believe initially it was thought that these drugs activate GABA

receptors and kind of have a CNS depressive type effect through that mechanism. That is not the case. They do not bind GABA

receptors, even though it's right in their name. Their primary mechanism of action is they

impact voltage gated calcium channels within the brain.

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