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

Thank you so much for listening today. As always, go check out real-life pharmacology.com.

Snag your free study guide on the top 200 drugs. Great resource for those out in clinical practice.

Great refresher that way. If you're going through school,

I try to highlight some of the most important relevant real-world principles, as well as a lot of

those things that might show up on pharmacology exams and board exams. So again, go get that for

free, real-life pharmacology.com. Let's get into the drug of the day today, and that is

sucralphate. Brand name in this medication is caraphate, which I'll probably use that name

interchangeably here. This is a GI medication gastrointestinal agent.

I've seen it used in management of stomach ulcers,

GI symptoms associated with GERD, esophagitis.

Those are the two primary situations where this med's going to be used.

Mechanistically, how does it help maybe relieve some of those

symptoms of esophagitis, for example? So this drug actually forms a coating in the lining of the

stomach and GI tract. And it does this by binding positively charged proteins and ultimately this coating protects the

lining of the stomach from stomach acid which is generally what we try to think about

when we're thinking about esophagitis think about some of our other agents that I've covered

maybe a Fomodidine or a, you know, protonics, omeprosol, those meds. They seek to reduce the

production of stomach acid. Sucrophate, caraphate, works to kind of protect the lining of the stomach of the GI tract from that acid.

On the dosage form side of things, there is a suspension and a tablet.

So this, as you could imagine, has to be an oral medication. We can't give this medication

IV because it needs to be in the stomach and creating kind of that protective layer there.

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