Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen today. Always remember, head to real life

pharmacology.com. Grab your free Top 200 study guide, just a little item I put together. It's 31-page

PDF, so it's definitely significant. A good little

review if you're taking board exams or just want a quick refresher on the top 200 drugs and

common effects there. So the drug of the day today is Dapagliflozin or Farsiga. And this medication is what's called an sGLT2 inhibitor and this medication

is used to manage diabetes primarily and i'll get a little bit more into the indication here lately

because this is one of the reasons I'm tackling this drug

is we've had some recent updates.

So mechanistically in diabetes, how does this medication work?

Essentially it reduces the reabsorption of glucose back into the body. So it blocks that reabsorption of glucose back into the body.

And what that means is lower blood glucose, like when a patient tests their blood sugar.

And it also means there's more glucose in the urine. I'll talk about that a little bit as far as adverse effects.

So that's how it lowers blood sugar.

However, there is one particular alternate mechanism that this medication has,

and it also reduces sodium reabsorption.

So if you remember sodium, excessive intake and excessive water that stays with that sodium

can be a big issue in something like heart failure.

So by SGLT2 inhibitors like Dapagliflozin, reducing sodium reabsorption back into the body,

water can go with that.

So these drugs also have a mild diuretic type of effect, which, as you can imagine, what condition do we use diuretics in?

Of course, that's heart failure.

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