Welcome back to the podcast, Real Life Pharmacology.

Today I'm going to cover Bactrum or Septra.

So this is a combination agent made up of trimethyphthalm and sulfamothoxazole.

The mechanism of action here with this medication is ultimately it inhibits bacterial folic acid production

and we do have two different medications within this and they essentially both do this with the

kind of varying mechanism of actions there.

So basically I think for most purposes, most test purposes,

I think inhibiting bacterial folic acid production is probably the best way

to remember that mechanism of action there. So uses with this medication

oftentimes probably most often I'll see this used for urinary tract infections. I have seen it

used for skin and soft tissue infections like a cellulitis type situation.

I may rarely see it used for upper respiratory tract issues.

It is one of the drugs of choice in PCP prophylaxis and patients with HIV or immunocompromised states. So that's a good one to remember there. Backterm 4 PCP prophylaxis in HIV. Definitely a testable question that I've seen before.

Now as far as side effects goes, you know, with any antibiotic that we're using to, you know,

treat gram-negative infections or whatever infections we're treating, GI symptoms can happen

with just about all of them. So stomach upset, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, we all. We definitely need to pay attention to that.

Most often with antibiotics, we try to encourage patients to push through those type of symptoms,

take with food, do whatever we can to obviously continue that course of antibiotic,

which is going to be necessary for managing an infection.

Other maybe unique side effects to Bactram specifically, you may see rash, and there are so many patients with a

sulfa allergy or termed a sulfa allergy that may get that rash from this

medication so with that you've got to remember that this is a dual medication. There are two medications within

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