Hey all, this is Eric Christensen from the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. Be sure to check out the website

reallife pharmacology.com for a free 30-plus page PDF on the top 200 drugs. Great study guide for

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simply following the podcast and when we have new episodes available.

So on today's episode, I'm going to cover iron pharmacology, iron supplements, very commonly

used in clinical practice.

And the most common situation is in iron deficiency anemia.

So if you remember some of the physiology, iron is an essential component

in the production of red blood cell.

Red blood cell production is fairly complicated,

and obviously there's multiple things that go into that production.

I'm not going to cover that on this podcast at this time,

but you've got to remember that iron plays a huge, huge role,

and if patients are deficient, we can see... but you've got to remember that iron plays a huge, huge role.

And if patients are deficient, we can see low hemoglobin and hematicrit readings because of that.

And anybody who presents with anemia, they're going to feel fatigued, tired, weak, maybe pale looking in color. In addition to iron deficiency anemia, I did want to mention restless leg syndrome. So this is definitely a differential. If you've

ever got a patient that is taking a dopamine agonist like Requip or Myrapex, and they have Restless Leg

Syndrome, patients with low iron can also display symptoms of Restless Leg Syndrome.

So this is a really key factor in trying to prevent polypharmacy, because if we see that a patient is newly diagnosed with this

and their provider starts them on a dopamine agonist, I would definitely want to make sure

that this patient is not iron deficient first. So kind of one other additional diagnosis that I think is important to think about

when we are thinking about iron deficiency in general.

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