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

Thanks so much for listening and making this podcast popular and sharing it with your friends.

I'm greatly overwhelmed by the number of people that care about pharmacology and I really want to learn and try to pick up some clinical pearls.

So you can reach out to me, real-life pharmacology.com.

And with that, let's get into the drug we're going to talk about today, which is Zolpidem.

So the brand name for Zopidem is Ambien.

And this is a drug that I see on a somewhat regular basis. I think it's less nowadays because of

some of the risks associated with the drug than it was maybe five, ten plus years ago there. So

very, very important to understand some things about this medication.

First, let's talk about the mechanism of action, because I think that's important.

One of the drugs or the class of drugs that I associate Zolpidem with is the benzodiazepines.

So there's definitely a significant amount of overlap between Zopidem and benzodiazepines.

The difference, the primary difference, so both drugs class versus Zopidem, class of

benzodiazepines versus Zopidem, excuse me,

they enhance the effects of GABA.

And GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter.

Now, there's a couple of different sites, receptor sites, that I need to cover here. So there's the benzodiazepine

1 receptor site and benzodiazepine 2 receptor site. And the primary difference between

Zopidem and the benzodiazepines is the activity on those sites. So agonist activity on benzodiazepine site

one will ultimately lead to the sedative, sleeping, hypnotic type adverse effects, which

benzodiazepines and zopidem carry.

Now, zopidem is a little bit more selective for that site.

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