Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast.

I am your host, Eric Christensen, pharmacist.

Thank you so much for listening to all you that have left ratings review on iTunes or wherever you're listening.

I'm so appreciative of that.

If you want to track me down, probably the best way is through the website, real-life pharmacology.com. You can send me an email there. I'm also on

MedEd.1.1.com. So if you hit the contact button, you can catch me there as well. If there's a

suggestion, comment, concern, definitely track me down. Also, LinkedIn. I'm relatively active on

LinkedIn. So you can connect with me there as well.

So today's drug, what I'm going to cover is naloxone.

And this is obviously a drug that's been in the press a lot for sure

with regards to some of the opioid issues, addiction, things that are going out there in the country and community.

So this drug in general essentially stops or blocks the activity of opioids.

So it's classified as an opioid antagonist.

And so what it does, how it works from a pharmacological perspective,

is it essentially boots or kicks out the classic opioid,

so that's your morphine or your fentanyl, heroin, and so on and so forth,

it'll kick that opioid off the receptor so that drug stops having physiological effects.

And in patients who have overdose that we use naloxone for, that activation of those opioid receptors

can lead to that respiratory depression. That's one of the primary causes of death in patients

who overdose is those opioids basically stop that respiratory tract from working and activating.

So again, by blocking opioid receptors, we prevent those opioid agonists to perpetuate,

continue that overdose situation.

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