Welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I am your host, Eric Christensen. A few of you have asked how to contact me, to track me down. You can certainly do that through the website, reallife pharmacology.com. Also fairly active on LinkedIn as well. So you can find Eric Christensen pharmacist there as well. If you've got a question,

if you're looking for a speaker, if you're whatever the asking about products and different

things, those are probably the two best ways to track me down. So with that note, today's podcast, I'm going to cover Trazodone.

The brand name there would be Desiril. It's not something you hear too often. Usually it's maybe

with more experience providers that have been around the block for quite some time and are used to

using the brand name. But I would say most healthcare professionals go by the generic.

And I did want to cover a little bit on dosing as far as indication for use. So tracadone can be

pretty sedating. And we can use that obviously to help with

certain conditions like insomnia. So if you see a patient usually at generally lower doses,

so maybe in the 25, maybe up to 100 milligram dosing range, and it's specifically dosed at night.

Most often, it's probably being used for the indication of sleep.

Now, it is classified as an antidepressant, and it does have antidepressant activity,

but typically you have to get up into the higher dosages of 200 milligrams, 300 milligrams,

in that range to start getting antidepressant effects.

And also when you start getting up to those higher doses,

the drug becomes less and less tolerable,

which all kind of cover the whole list of side effects coming up here.

From a mechanistic point of view, the drug does have some serotonin re-uptake activity. There is also some histamine blocking activity,

some alpha-1 blocking activity as well. So looping in side effects into that mechanism,

which I think is a really helpful way of remembering these drugs.

If you remember the antihistamine effect, that's likely where your sedation is going to come from.

If you remember alpha-1 blocking activity, that can potentially contribute to orthostasis, dizziness, maybe fall risk, things of that nature.

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