What are smooth muscles when talking about muscle relaxing medical drugs?
AudioPhilia please stick to your word play section. Smooth muscle is not the same as cardiac muscle. To answer your question… Lorazepam doesn’t affect the smooth muscles the way you are thinking. It increases neurological firing rate of GABA. They call it a muscle relaxant… but it really relaxes your neuronal firing rate from your brain, not at the peripheral muscular level. I hope that makes sense. As far as LES is concerned… lorazepam shouldn’t have any direct relaxing effect on the LES. A much better Neurotransmitter for LES is dopamine. Inhibiting D2 will tighten the LES, and increasing D2 will relax LES (Metoclopramide works by this mechanism). Added: As my colleague mentioned above anticholinergics will relax smooth muscles in the GI… but with the exception of sphincter (like LES). Cholinergic innervation to the sphincters is to relax them. In the presence of anticholinergics they will do the opposite… constrict. Hope that makes sense. If you have further questions ask
