Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Derek Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. I can't thank you guys all enough for support of this

podcast. You can continue to support it through MedEd 101.com slash store. If you need some study

materials, or you're looking for a book, looking for more

education on pharmacology in general, I've got all the links to resources there. Definitely

overwhelmed by the amount of support and that support directly goes to helping me keep this

podcast going and alive to help benefit others down the road, whether that

be new students or new healthcare professionals. So greatly appreciate that. With that said,

let's get into the drugs of the day today. We are continuing on with the top 200 list. I'm going to

pick up on drug number 46, and that is Tizanidine.

Brand name in this medication is Xaniflex.

This is a skeletal muscle relaxant or sometimes referred to as an antispasmodic agent, obviously for muscle spasms and those type of symptoms,

really a symptomatic treatment that I see occasionally used.

Mechanistically, it's what's called a central acting alpha-2 agonist, and that ultimately helps reduce that muscle

spasticity. With that said, if you think about this medication, it has a similar mechanism of

action to clonidine, or at least overlapping in some ways.

So what that means, as far as a side effect profile, is if you can remember what some of the

side effects of clonidine are, you're probably going to remember some potential adverse

effects of tizanidine as well. So it's probably a good guess with any skeletal muscle

relaxant that it can be sedating. So that can certainly happen. It can increased risk for CNS changes

and confusion. Particularly this is a little higher risk in my patient population the older we get the more and more

likely we are to experience that and then if you think about what clonidine is sometimes used for

...