Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Derek Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to follow the podcast, get new updates when we've got some awesome content available, definitely go to real-life pharmacology.com.

It's a bonus. We'll get you our 30-page PDF on the top 200 drugs. It's a great study guide,

great refresher if you're out in practice. So definitely go take advantage of that. Simply

in email is all it's going to cost you. So again, do that at real-life pharmacology.com.

All right, the drug of the day today is tamoxifen.

Brand name of this medication is Novodex.

Also, saltimax is also another brand name that you might hear.

This medication is classified as a CERM, S-E-R-M.

And that stands for selective estrogen receptor modulator.

Mechanistically, how does this drug work? What does it do? In practice, the primary use that I've

seen this medication used for is breast cancer treatment, breast cancer risk reduction. And it works by selectively

binding estrogen receptors. That's right in the name, selective estrogen receptor modulator.

And essentially, this binding of the estrogen receptors on tumors prevents estrogen from binding.

And for certain estrogen receptor mediated tumors, this is essentially going to reduce DNA synthesis

and ultimately slow the growth if we

prevent estrogen from binding those receptors. So tamoxifen prevents that estrogen from binding,

which ultimately reduces and or slows the growth of tumors.

So again, the primary use, obviously breast cancer risk reduction.

Dosing of this medication is usually pretty straightforward.

Most of the time it's going to be 20 milligrams once a day.

The timing and how long that medication is taken can vary. In my experience,

...