Different Classes of Drugs?

Question

What are the different classes or drugs? For example, antihistamines, anticoagulants, etc. Are the four types of drugs (stimulants, narcotics, depressants, and hallucinogens) just broad prescription drugs, street drugs, or are they just the general categories that all drugs fit into? Thanks and this is for my own personal knowledge, not school. And if there are like a thousand classes of drugs, just give me a link or something. I wouldn't want you to write them all down, not that you would. Thanks again.

Answer 1

It depends on -how- you want to classify them, as there's various ways to do so. Categorizing them by structure, organic chemistry-wise, there are indeed thousands. You can also categorize by mechanism of action - how they work in the body, which is how the pharmacological people do. You can also categorize them by use - which is the way the medical community does. The easiest way is probably by how they are used.

Wikipedia's article on medication is fairly good on this - classifying by which body system they operate on. This is a fairly decent means, that eliminates a lot of the crossover.

A lot of it depends on which field you are in, and how you want to address the drug. For example: Antiepileptic drugs are a type of psychoactive drug. All anti-epileptics are also mood stabilizers. But within this class, in my field, we tend to address medications that share a specific mechanism of action - say calcium channel blocking, or sodium channel blocking. By doing this we can easily group drugs that share a common indication and set of side effects.

Organic chemists like to classify by the structure. This isn't too useful when dealing with medicine. As there are certain medications that have very dissimilar structures, but share the same mechanism of action. Atypical antipsychotics are a good example of this, as are antihistamines. This system tends to be used when we come up with novel drugs, until we figure out how they act. It does tend to come back when discriminating between similar drugs that act a same way. For example, certain benzodiazepines that have side groups attached at different points have slightly different potency and toxicity.

If you have any specific questions feel free to message me, I'll be happy to answer.