Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast.

I'm your host, Eric Christensen Pharmacist.

Thank you so much for listening.

We hope you find this podcast educational, and it can help you in your healthcare career,

no matter what profession you're in here.

So with that said, we're going to cover dexamethazone today.

So dexamethosone, brand name of this medication that I've heard most often in clinical practice is

decadron, and this drug is a corticosteroid.

So corticosteroids can reduce inflammation by decreasing production of many different inflammatory mediators.

In addition, it also suppresses the immune system

and also can have anti-emetic effects. Now I don't believe

the mechanism of action with the anti-emetic effects is well understood, but it's definitely

something that has been shown in studies.

So thinking about this mechanism of action, thinking about this classification, it is a corticosteroid,

so I have covered prednisone, but I wanted to cover this med specifically because there are

kind of some unique things with this medication.

So let's talk about uses a little bit. So obviously a corticosteroid, you know, similar to prednisone,

it can be used for those inflammatory conditions. So rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, things of that nature.

Chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, which I'll kind of talk a little bit more so about

throughout the podcast there, but basically as an add-on therapy to some of our other agents like

on Dancetron, maybe a prepetent, and medications like that. Additionally, dexamethosone is uniquely used

for what's called the dexamethosone suppression test.

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