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

Thank you so much for listening today. Go check out real life pharmacology.com. Get your free 31-page

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Other than that, we just signed up for when we have new podcast episodes available and other

new content. So a couple examples on that. We've recently released a pharmacology flashcard book. Also recently

released a pharmacology crossword puzzle book as well. So those can both be found on Amazon,

flipping pharmacology flashcards and the MedEd 101 Pharmacology crossword puzzle book. All right, let's get into the drug

of the day today, and that is lovastatin. Brand name of this medication is Mevacore. And this statin is

not used very often. I see it occasionally, usually in patients who've been on it for a really,

really long time. But I definitely wanted to go over some clinical pearls with this medication

because there are some important reasons why we generally prefer rosuvastatin or atorvastatin,

which are probably the most commonly used statins.

So first and foremost, it being a statin, it inhibits HMG-CoA reductase.

So if you remember, that's an enzyme that plays a critical role in basically the formation of cholesterol within the body.

So by blocking that enzyme, you ultimately reduce the amount of cholesterol in the body.

And primarily what we're looking at reducing is LDL.

Dosing of this medication is usually 20 to 80 milligrams. Remember we have low, moderate,

and high intensity statins. Lova statin does not meet that 50% threshold. It is not considered a high

intensity statin. So that's kind of one strike against lovastatin compared to some of the other

higher-intensity statins like rosuvastatin and a torvastatin.

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