Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I am your host and pharmacist Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening. And those of you who have left a kind review in writing,

I'm doing my best to make sure the content stays good and relevant. So today we're going to cover sulfasalazine. A brand name of this

medication is azulfidine. And its category or its pharmacological category is a 5 ASA type compound. And that stands

for 5 amino salicylic acid derivative.

Now what this medication is used for out in clinical practice,

if you can remember that this drug is typically used for inflammatory type diseases,

autoimmune type diseases, you should be on the right track there.

Most commonly what I have seen in my practice is rheumatoid arthritis being used for that.

Also definitely has a role or I have seen used in ulstrivolitis and Crohn's disease, so some bowel and GI type disorders there.

And I have seen it used for psoriasis occasionally as well.

So very common disease states that are definitely out there that you'll see.

And this drug can be used within the treatment algorithm

for those types of disease states mechanistically how this drug works and how it benefits

a patient with these potential disease states it's really not that well understood.

We recognize it can help to reduce inflammation, and it's theorized at least by a couple

possible mechanisms.

So reduction in inflammation is possible through tumor necrosis factor inhibition.

Again, this is theorized. It's not very well understood exactly how this drug works.

Adverse effects, very important adverse effect, very common adverse effect of GI upset.

So nausea, vomiting.

And because of this, this is one of the reasons why we try to divide up the dose and not give one big daily dose once during the day.

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