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Today we are going to talk about alprazolam now the second essays olam you should be thinking about benzodiazepines right a lot of lorazepam though lambs the pam’s andso lambs are gonna be our benzodiazepines okay so as you hear that you need to start remembering that these are going to be benzodiazepines and there’s going to be some commonalities between each
Of them alright so the trade name about perez lambo xanax now surely you’ve heard of xanax a lot of people take it for anxiety both in the hospital and out of the hospital so some of the indications for this like we just said our anxiety panic disorder manage symptoms of pms insomnia mania and psychosis okay so there’s a lot of reasons why we would give this
Medication but a lot of times what you’ll see is we’re going to be giving a poor anxiety and many times even you’ll see patients who take a little bit as antics right before they go to bed okay so just like a pill court or a pill before going to bed now this would be like our pill form a lot of times that we would give to patients who would otherwise be on like a
Divan or something like that so we can give them alprazolam as the pill form so what it does it works in the cns to produce anxiety effects which also leads to cns depression so that’s the biggest thing that i want you to keep in mind with all of these benzodiazepines is the cns depression okay therapy to class is anti-anxiety agent and like we’ve said previously
Pharmacologic class is benzodiazepine so the biggest thing as a nurse that you really need to keep in mind as you’re giving these benzodiazepines up praslin is you need to keep in mind that it causes cns depression so we have a patient who already has existing cns depression you want to exercise a lot of caution okay especially things like sleep apnea our patient
Has decreased respirations or slowed heartrate already it’s we want to be very very careful about giving them these bins with as beans okay so we’re gonna wanna use caution with existing cns depression patients with renal dysfunction or hepatic dysfunction okay so again it can cause this cns depression can cause lethargy it can cause drowsiness and it may lead and
You know this probably already just from being a human is that this can actually lead to physical dependence okay what will happen is a lot of patients can experience a tolerance effect meaning that it takes more for them to get the experience that they used to have at that and anti-anxiety experience that they used to get from it it’s gonna take a higher dose
And so it can create this physical dependence for these patients and so we’ll really want to monitor our patients that we try to prevent that from happening okay as we’re giving these to our patients we’re gonna want to and assess their anxiety and their mental status okay we want to make sure that it’s having the desired effect and we’re gonna want to make sure
That we’re closely monitoring their cns okay we’re gonna want to monitor their heart rate we’re gonna want to monitor their respirations and things like that one thing that i really want you to keep in mind is that there is an antidote so if a patient does experience an overdose if they become very somnolent or very lethargic or their respirations drop there is
A medication called flumazenil generic name is rome as a con and that is the antidote for overdose so that’s one thing that you really need to keep in mind because what’ll happen is it doesn’t have been incredibly often but patients may experience an overdose with this now this might be caused by accident by the nurse that the patient is is has a dose for ativan
Or for the razza pan or for alprazolam and this might be the first time you’ve actually given it to the patient so you don’t know how they’re going to respond to it they may be doing very well and you just give them their dose and then they’ll experience a very severe very rapid decrease in their cns okay so what you’ll need to do is you’ll need to run and grab
Your mazyck on a lot of nurses may not know this okay so if you can be that nurse on the floor that knows this and that is aware that this is something that can happen okay that you’re paying attention to the cns and you are aware and you notice that the patient experiences this this adverse effect you can quickly run grab that rome as a con and you can reverse
This and save this patient’s life okay i’ve seen this happen a couple times where the patient does experience these effects okay and they need to have this reversed very quickly and many times you know people don’t know what to get okay but rome as a con is what we’re gonna get for this so that’s really kind of what we need to understand about alprazolam biggest
Things i want you to keep in mind again our cns depression and then how to reverse it with this room as mom another episode of the med master podcast brought to you by med master course comm and in rs ng com my name is john haws are in ccr in student nurse mentor and your biggest fan if you’re ready to demolish nursing pharmacology once and for all head over to
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Transcribed from video
Alprazolam Nursing Considerations, Side Effects and Mechanism of Action Pharmacology for Nurses By NURSINGcom
