NURS 6630 psycho pharm Week 2 discussion

Explain the agonist-to-antagonist spectrum of action of psychopharmacologic agents, including how partial and inverse agonist functionality may impact the efficacy of psychopharmacologic treatments. Within the framework of traditional receptor theory, drugs can behave as agonists or antagonists. Agonists are drugs with both affinity (they bind to the target receptor) and intrinsic efficacy (they change receptor activity to produce a response). Antagonists have affinity but zero intrinsic efficacy; therefore they bind to the target receptor but do not produce a response (Berg & Clarke. 2018). As intrinsic efficacy differs with drug structure, agonists can have different intrinsic efficacies and consequently be characterized as full or partial agonists. A full agonist typically produces the maximal response a system is capable