Comment on ‘Spotlight commentary: Addressing the persistent problem of benzodiazepine overuse, time for clinical, educational and AI‐driven reform’

Diagrams fulfil an important role in communicating pharmacology. They can convey information succinctly and highlight the salient points. Upon reading the recent Spotlight Commentary article by Vukojević et al., ¹ Figure 1 raises concerns on both points.

1. Representation of the receptor structure. Diagrams of protein structures, such as those of receptors, communicate the essential features of these proteins that would be lost otherwise. They are not intended to be accurate representations, as this could lead to cognitive overload. However, they should still be true to the overall structure. There are several distinct issues with this figure:

   1. The view of the GABA_A receptor appears to be of the extracellular face since the five subunits are arranged around a central pore. However, the cell membrane is shown from the side, which orients the subunits in the wrong way.

   2. This means that the arrows, which presumably represent the movement of chloride ions, are going across the receptor from one side to the other rather than down through the pore.

   3. There are three additional crescent shaped subunits, which presumably represent the binding sites for GABA (×2) and benzodiazepines. Since these shapes are of similar size to the receptor subunits, this gives the impression that the binding sites are on separate protein subunits rather than at the interfaces between subunits.

   4. The figure legend implies that GABA is an allosteric modulator, which it is not.

2. The figure itself adds little to convey the meaning of the paper, which is an excellent commentary about sources of supply of benzodiazepines to the public rather than the molecular aspects. There are many numbers in the text that would benefit from being represented in a table. This would have much greater impact and communicate the key message of the paper more effectively.

As pharmacology educators, we use figures in journals to help us convey complex information to students and stimulate their interest in the latest research. Consequently, we are concerned that Figure 1 in this paper could be considered misleading of the structure of the GABA_A receptor, thus limiting its usefulness in pharmacology education. Furthermore, the numerical information contained in this paper is very relevant for clinical pharmacology teaching and a visual representation in a table would have aided in communicating these important findings.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Jennifer Koenig: Conceptualization; writing—review and editing. Anna‐Marie Babey: Conceptualization; writing—review and editing. Graham Johnston: Conceptualization, writing—review and editing.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.