Overview – Antimycobacterial Agents

00:01 Welcome to pharmacology by Lecturio.

00:04 We're going to continue our discussion about antibiotics by talking about some unique antibacterials.

00:09 These are a list of the different categories that we have covered so far.

00:13 The last group are the drugs that will really cover mycobacterial infections that includes tuberculosis, leprosy, and other types of infections like Mycobacterium avium.

00:24 In terms of the anti-TB drugs or anti-mycobacterial agents will really focus on some of the tuberculous agents as individual drugs and not focus so much today on the therapies that are usually used in combination.

00:40 Now, tuberculosis agents can either be bacteriostatic, or bactericidal.

00:45 What does that mean? First of all, bacteriostatic means that you just stop the replication of bacteria.

00:51 You're not actually killing them.

00:53 what you're doing is you're allowing the immune system to catch up to those numbers, so that the immune system can take care of those live bacteria left.

01:01 Bactericidal actually refers to the death of bacteria.

01:05 In this case, the antibacterial agent is killing the bacterium.

01:10 Now, when we talk about tuberculosis, we usually talk about using them in three or four drug combinations.

01:17 In most disease states, we try to use one or two drugs to treat a particular disease.

01:22 But in tuberculosis, it's so hard to treat that we actually will need to combine different agents from different drug classes to get a full resolution and treatment of the disease.

01:34 Sometimes will even go as far as to directly observe the therapies.

01:39 So I saw this happen myself when I was practicing in rural Canada on the Prairies, and in northern communities, where patients may not be as, say, adherent to the regimen as we would like.

01:53 In those cases, whether it's due to other diseases that are taking part or due to social reasons, we have to actually watch patients take the medications.

02:02 If we don't have directly observed therapy, and if there's any kind of a reduction in adherence to therapy, the therapy just doesn't work.

02:10 That's why DOT regimens in tuberculosis are so important.

02:14 Now, you can see here I have an image.

02:17 It's a close up image of a mycobacterium tuberculosis culture.