Rifampin Pharmacology

Real Life Pharmacology - Pharmacology Education for Health Care Professionals

Eric Christianson, PharmD; Pharmacology Expert and Clinical Pharmacist

Education, Health & Fitness, Medicine

5 • 716 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rifampin is classified as an antibiotic and an antituberculosis agent. It primarily works by inhibiting bacterial RNA polymerase.

While not extremely common, rifampin is well known to cause hepatic dysfunction.

You should remind patients who are taking rifampin that it can alter the color of tears, sweat, saliva and urine. It can change these fluids to a reddish/brown color.

Rifampin is very well known for causing drug interactions. It is an enzyme inducer that can reduce the concentrations of numerous medications such as warfarin, apixaban, cyclosporin, levothyroxine, and oral contraceptives to name a few.

Rifampin can be used to help prevent meningococcal infection. Learn more on rifampin by listening to this podcast!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, all, Eric Christensen, pharmacist back here with the Real Life Pharmacology podcast.
0:06.9	Today I'm going to be covering Refampin Pharmacology. If you haven't listened to the podcast
0:13.4	before, you can find all the episodes at reallife pharmacology.com. You can also sign up to get emails when we've got a new podcast available,
0:24.5	as well as we've got a free 31-page PDF on the top 200 drugs,
0:31.5	where I highlight some really, really important, relevant clinical pearls
0:36.3	kind of from each medication within the list of the top
0:40.8	200 there. So really nice resource. Sponsor of this podcast, MedEd101.com slash store.
0:48.0	Go check out all our resources there and greatly appreciative of that sponsorship.
0:57.7	So with that, let's get into refampin.
1:08.2	This drug is classified as an antibiotic, also may be classified as an antiturculosis agent, and that's probably the setting you're going to see it used most often. Some other
1:13.7	indications you may see it used for meningococcal prophylaxis, so prophylaxis for a certain
1:20.7	type of meningitis prevention there. Osteomyelitis, I've seen it for add-ons there, that type of infection, joint infections,
1:30.3	I've also seen it for that. Those are the primary ones that I've seen this drug used for in real life.
1:40.3	Now with that, I did want to mention that you rarely, rarely see refampin used as monotherapy.
1:49.6	So you rarely see refampin used by itself.
1:52.7	And the reason for that is resistance can quickly develop with bacteria and the use of this agent. So if you ever see refampin used alone
2:04.8	without any other antibiotics, you definitely want to take a note and look at that and look into that
2:11.6	and make sure that is correct. Now, the exception being there with prophylaxis.
2:23.8	So meningitis prophylaxis, that's a situation where you might actually see it used alone.
2:31.9	But again, very, very seldom, if we're treating an active infection, because of resistance,
2:35.3	you will likely not see Raphampin used alone.
2:41.1	And if you do see it used alone, that's definitely a good spot to ask that question and make sure that this is right.
	...

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