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

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The drug of the day today is naltrexone. A brand name of this medication is Revia,

otherwise known as Vivitrol as well, which is an injectable formulation of this medication.

So naltrexone is an opioid antagonist.

If you've listened to the podcast for some time, I have covered an opioid antagonist already.

And that would be Naloxone, brand name a Narcan there.

Naltrexone is used in kind of a significantly different way than naloxone. So just kind of summing it up here briefly here,

Naltrexone blocks opioids effects, basically, by binding to those mu receptors at a fairly high affinity.

They do bind them pretty significantly, so other opioids can't bind there.

With that said, I will say patients, there is reports of this as well.

When you start blocking a receptor, what can happen is the body basically responds to that

and it's not feeling enough endogenous opioid activity potentially or it feels like it may need to feel more.

And so the body, because those receptors are blocked, starts upregulating receptors.

So basically, you know, producing, creating more and having them more readily available

to receive kind of that binding and the stimulation.

So anyway, patients, because of this potential

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