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

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out at real life pharmacology.com the drug of the day today is levofloloxasin. Brand name is Levaquin. When I first graduated many, many years ago,

I saw this medication used a lot for sure. It is a little bit of a broader spectrum antibiotic.

It is part of the quinolone class of medications and quinolones inhibit DNA gyrase.

Now this is important, DNA gyrase is important for DNA replication, transcription, and ultimately maintaining DNA structure.

So by blocking DNA gyrase, this basically blocks that relaxation of supercoiled DNA

and ultimately facilitates the breaking of DNA strands within bacteria

and also ultimately prevents replication and transcription.

So that's how this medication works, which is pretty unique compared to a lot of other antibiotics,

which work on ribosomes or cell wall inhibition. This is definitely a bit of a unique mechanism

of action. Dosing of this medication, typically you're going to see in the range of 250 to 750 milligrams per day.

It can be reduced based upon renal function or the frequency can also be reduced based upon renal function there.

Severe infections, you know, you're going to be pushing 500 to 750 milligrams, maybe less severe infections or patients with poor renal function, things of that nature.

We may be looking more towards the 250 milligram dose.

Indications, what do we use this for?

It's got a lot of potential uses, and I think that goes along with the broader spectrum of coverage that this medication has.

So pneumonia can be used for UTIs, skin and soft tissue infections, joint and bone infections,

even as an alternative medication in some of the STDs as well as tuberculosis.

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