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

And today I'm going to cover loop diuretics. So these are a pretty common medication that can be

really utilized to help promote the loss of fluid out of the body. I think about these medications and it's like I try to step back and say,

okay, well, why would we want to increase the amount of fluid loss throughout the body?

So there are certain disease states, heart failure, for example,

where we can have this fluid overload,

certain different types of edema, excuse me, edema in different locations.

Acides is another example of a disease state where we might have excessive fluid.

So that's primarily what these drugs are going to be used for, and they're

very, very potent, and they're very good at eliminating fluid from the body. So drugs within these

class, some examples, we've got ferrosamide in practice. That is the most common example that I see used.

Brand name there is LASICs.

We've got Torsomide, brand name Demodex.

We've got Bumetanide, brand name Bumex.

And one other one I'll just throw in there is ethocrinic acid, and I'll talk about that a little bit later,

but there's a slightly different variation with its structure compared to the other agents that might make it advantageous.

But I'll cover that as we kind of talk about side effects and risks of things. So mechanism of action,

what you're probably going to want to know for a pharmacology exam or board exam is by remembering

the term loop on loop diuretics, that refers to the kidney.

So these drugs block reabsorption of sodium and chloride,

and it primarily does that in the ascending loop of Henley,

which is part of the kidney and the nephron.

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