Hey friend, Christina here from nursingschoolofsuccess.com, and, is your brain just about to explode with
all the medications you need to know about in nursing school?
I TOTALLY feel you.
There are so many medications to know, and it can be tough to remember the mechanism
of action for all of those meds in nursing school, right?!
So today I'm going to go over the mechanism of action of furosemide, so you won't need
to stress about it in nursing school.
I'll break it down super simple so you'll be able to remember it.
And if you're part of our NursingSOS Community, make sure to print off the furosemide study
guide we've got for you.
Just sign into your dashboard and you'll find it in the pharmacology section.
You may also want to watch the furosemide video we've got for you inside the NursingSOS
Community, it covers more about furosemide than we'll go over here: like side effects,
what you'll need to assess for, and lab values to check, things like that.
So if you're part of the NursingSOS Community, head on over there and check that video out.
Now, let's talk about the mechanism of action of furosemide.
So you may have heard of furosemide before, it's a super common medication that you'll
give during nursing school.
It's also called Lasix, so furosemide and lasix are the same thing, so don't get confused
if you hear it called lasix.
Lasix is just it's trade name or it's brand name, whereas furosemide is the generic name.
So furosemide is a diuretic, and more specifically it's a loop diuretic.
And that's really important for you to know, and I'll let you know why in a minute, but
first, let's walk through exactly how a loop diuretic, and specifically how furosemide,
acts in the body, meaning it's mechanism of action.
So the main place furosemide acts in the body is the kidney, and more specifically, the
nephron within the kidney, which is the part of the kidney that does pretty much all the
work.
The nephron's job is to make urine.
I always like to draw the nephron as a squigaly line.
So you've got your glomerulus, the proximal convoluted tubule (or the PCT), the loop of
Henle, the distal convoluted tubule (of the DCT), and the collecting duct.
So those are the basic parts of the nephron.
So blood starts at the glomerulus, and I always call the glomerulus Garbage Man Glomerulus,
because his job is to take out all of the waste and trash from the blood.
So Garbage Man glomerulus is filtering out all of the waste from the blood, and all of
that waste is going to move down into the proximal convoluted tubule, into the loop
of Henle, through the distal convoluted tubule, and out through the collecting duct, which
is going to take it into the ureter and to the bladder.
So all this time, waste products from the body are being moved out, into the urine,
through these tubules.
Now what are these waste products?
Well, there are a lot, but today, we are just going to talk about a few of them: sodium,
chloride, and potassium.
Even though these are things the body needs, the excess water, the excess sodium, chloride
and potassium gets pulled out of the body through the nephron.
So furosemide is a LOOP diuretic.
So where do you think it's going to act within the nephron?
BINGO!
Furosemide is going to act on the LOOP of Henle, because it's a LOOP diuretic.
So the loop of Henle's job is to help balance electrolytes, and it does this by moving electrolytes,
specifically sodium and chloride, but also potassium, back into the body from the nephron.
So this is called reabsorption, it's going to help reabsorb those elctrolytes into the
body.
And here's where furosemide comes in.
Furosemide's mechanism of action is the block this from happening.
It blocks sodium, chloride and potassium from getting reabsorbed into the body, so those
electrolytes stay in the tubules and move out through the urine.
So there's a lot of electrolyte loss.
And not only that, there's a little rule you MUST know in nursing school, and that rule
is: where sodium goes, water follows.
Sodium and water are BFFs, they like to stick together.
So when all of that sodium is being carried away through the urine, water is tagging along
for the ride.
They are BFFS.
So, all around, furosemide causes a lot of sodium, chloride, potassium and water loss
from the body.
It blocks sodium, chloride and potassium from moving back into the body, and it causes them
to be secreted into the urine.
And we know that wherever sodium goes, water follows, so there is a lot of water loss as
well.
And this is what causes diuresis, that's a lot of urine loss.
So that is the mechanism of action of furosemide.
Furosemide is a loop diuretic, and it acts on the loop of Henle to cause diuresis.
If this video helped you understand more about nursing school pharmacology, be sure to hit
that like button and I would love to you to leave a comment and let me know what other
medication videos you'd like to see covered.
I'll chat with you in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching friend, now go become the nurse that God created only
YOU to be.
I'll catch you next time on the nursing school show.
Take care.