On today's episode of real-life pharmacology,

I'm going to talk about one of my favorite drugs called phenotone.

The brand name of phenotone is dilatine,

and it's got a lot of clinical pearls that you have to know.

I've seen dilatine toxicity, phenatone toxicity,

due to lack of understanding on the part of physicians, nurse practitioners,

and other health care professionals. So definitely pay attention here today. I'm going to talk

about some really important things as far as pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics.

So first off, the mechanism of action, it's kind of one of those older, dirtier type

drugs that can kind of do a few different things.

Maybe the mechanism isn't totally perfectly well understood.

Bottom line, it kind of stabilizes neurons and is used for epilepsy and

management of seizures. And it does that by primarily altering sodium movement kind of across the

cell, which ends up kind of managing and stabilizing that cell membrane and kind of preventing that

reactivity which may contribute or cause a seizure.

As far as side effects go with Dylanton, one way I remember this medication is I do think of alcohol toxicity. So if you've ever seen

somebody that's had a little too much to drink, ataxia, so a difficulty, walking, maybe

shuffling, poor gait, things like that, confusion, slurred speech, another example there that can happen.

Ultimately can lead to, you know, passing out if it gets that severe.

Another thing you may see is GI side effects, nausea, stomach upset, things like that. For other maybe not necessarily toxic

level side effects, rarely you may see liver function changes with phenotone, so you may see

LFTs or liver function tests being monitored.

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