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

Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you pick up some clinical pearls today.

Today I'm going to cover Metoprolol. The reason I'm doing this, you can go back and listen to the

beta blockers section where I gave kind of a general overview and some clinical pearls

and tricks kind of to the class as a whole. But I have had requests to kind of do individualized

agents within some of those classes just to recognize that there are differences between some of these agents.

So I wanted to highlight some of those differences.

Certainly we'll cover the basics of each medication as well.

And I'm going to do that with Matoprilal.

So first off, let's discuss some of the names of metoprilal.

So the biggest thing to remember with metoprilal is there's primarily two oral dosage forms.

And metoprolal tartrate is the immediate release formulation.

This is going to be dosed generally two to three times per day. I would say in the overwhelming

majority of cases, I see a dose twice per day. The brand name of the immediate release product is

low presser. Now on the flip side, we do have an extended release product, and that is metoprolal succinate, which goes by the name of Topral or Toprol XL.

That is typically dosed once a day.

And simply put, the reason being why this dosing is like that is because of the pharmacokinetics.

The duration of action for the immediate release is, you know,

in the ballpark of three to six hours.

So we need to dose that multiple times per day.

Duration of action for the extended release,

obviously is going to be closer to a full day or 24 hours.

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