Welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. Today I'm tackling one of my favorites as a geriatric

clinical pharmacist. One of my favorites is dejoxin, not because it's the greatest medication in the

world, but it's got a ton of clinical pearls that relates to its pharmacology.

The mechanism of action of dejoxon is that it binds the sodium-potassium ATP's pump.

And what that eventually leads to is it can lead to an increase in contractility, but it does suppress the

AV node as well. So it can bring down that heart rate in something like atrophibulation.

And in congestive heart failure, you may actually see it used to help with the symptoms of fatigue,

ergo it works on the increased contractility side of things.

So, again, brings down the pulse, brings down the heart rate,

and potentially increases contractility of the heart.

Common uses, atrial fibrillation, heart failure.

Those are pretty much the two biggest that you're ever going to see dejoxton used for.

As far as side effects goes,

dejoxin can definitely cause GI upset in the situation of toxicity.

It can also drop the pulse too far, where it over suppresses basically that AV node leading to reduced heart rate.

In our geriatric patient population, you may see cognitive changes, whether it's sedation,

confusion, those type of symptoms. Another hallmark symptom of dejoxin toxicity is weight loss.

So kind of along with the GI nausea and vomiting weight loss can definitely happen and usually it's a

relatively abrupt weight loss you know maybe over a period of a couple weeks in that that time

frame rarely I can't say I I have hardly seen this, but rarely it can cause visual changes.

Usually this is at very, very high doses where maybe a patient was, you know, taking two a day or three a day.

Maybe they had cognitive issues or something.

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