Micajah Poole Med Expert Monday – May 24, 2021
What’s up guys welcome back to med expert monday my name is make a pool and i just finished up my second year at isu college of pharmacy which is very exciting i’m on the pocatello campus um so just a little about me you can probably guess that i’m you know interested in drugs and learning about drugs since i decided to go to pharmacy school school and to study
It further in particular um for me i love learning about the pathways in the body i find them extremely fascinating i love being able to piece together how drugs work within the body and personally i kind of like to think of it like a puzzle so if you can kind of see how the drugs work within the body and then kind of start to piece it together in your mind
You can kind of start to predict well we might use this drug for this or maybe in this circumstance or situation and then you go a little further and you can see well this might cause this side effect based on how it works in the body and so as pharmacists that’s something that we we do quite a bit especially in in a retail setting when it comes to counseling
On medications and that sort of thing and that currently is where i work in a retail setting so i see this a lot and so i was trying to kind of think of some examples of particular drugs that might be um easier to illustrate this point i like all drugs um but i decided to go with uh the blood pressure pathway and particularly with lisinopril because i just
Think that that provides an excellent example for kind of what i’m talking about so just some real brief background on the blood pressure pathway so it kind of starts in the liver where we have the production of what’s called angiotensinogen and it’s converted by renin which is released from the kidney and converted into angiotensin one and then angiotensin
One is converted by angiotensin converting enzyme otherwise known as ace into angiotensin ii now angiotensin ii in and of itself is a vasoconstrictor so in doing that it constricts blood vessels so you get that rise in blood pressure but it also triggers the release of something called aldosterone which it causes some sodium retention and ultimately some water
Retention which also can lead to increased blood pressure so that’s just kind of the basics of the pathway but you can kind of start to see like where if we target one thing or if we target another we might be able to hinder this and so lisinopril is a great example because it’s what we call an ace inhibitor so it inhibits that angiotensin converting enzyme from
Turning uh angiotensin 1 into angiotensin ii and ultimately rising blood pressure so that in and of itself is is how the medication works but then if you kind of think of it in this sense there’s some other things that the ace inhibitor or the sorry the ace enzyme is involved in and that includes the breakdown of what’s called bradykinin in the lungs and so when
You inhibit that enzyme it’s not going to be breaking down the bradycain in the lungs which is going to cause a dry cough right so that would be a side effect of lysinopril so when you start to kind of piece these things together i i just find that so fascinating so interesting and then you can also look at okay well if if that does that what if we targeted
For example angiotensin ii itself if we just target the angiotensin to itself and we just target that instead well then you would have a medication called losartan right and so uh or you could if you wanted to target aldosterone outright you have a medication called spironolactone so it’s it’s so fascinating to me that we can find all of these pathways in the
Body and then apply a drug to that target so that we can ultimately change our our ultimate goal and then in this case would be lowering the blood pressure so i just think that that not only is that so interesting it opens up a world of possibilities in the future as we continue to discover things within the body we’re constantly finding out new pathways and and
New things that we we thought previously existed in in the body and maybe had a big impact that no longer do so uh when you kind of start to piece these things together you can come up with new drugs you can come up with new drug targets and you can change the market and you can entirely change how someone might respond to a medication and you can help them in
Ways that you know previously was unheard of there’s new medications coming out all the time that can provide better relief of a disease state or illness to a patient and and that is something that has always attracted me to pharmacy and will always attract me to pharmacy is that continual development and improvement in helping our patients feel better and and
Ultimately be healthier and that’s what i’m all about so thanks for spending some time with me today guys and i’ll talk to you later
Transcribed from video
Treating high blood pressure with Lisinopril – piecing the puzzle together By Idaho State University College of Pharmacy
