furosemide to trade name lasik system medication you are most likely already common with because so many patients take lasix because a lot of the conditions that we see people in the hospital for are things like CHF exacerbations or just general CSF is the CHF management or hypertension so there's a lot of reasons we would be giving lasix what the indications are for our edema hypertension CHF and what it does is that it actually prevents resorption of sodium and chloride in the kidneys and it increases the excretion of water sodium chloride magnesium and potassium this therapeutic class is diuretic it's pharmacologic class is loop diuretic some things to keep in mind with this is that it can cause hypotension dry mouth excessive urination dehydration electrolyte abnormalities and metabolic alkalosis so because we're giving this medication and what it does it's going to it's going to cause water along with a lot of electrolytes to lead the system okay through urination and because of this we can cause a lot of these electrolyte abnormalities so with furosemide we're going to lose our legislates we lose our sodium or chloride or magnesium or potassium and we could lead the patient into a lot of electrolyte abnormalities for example hypokalemia so for this reason we do have our potassium sparing diuretics but furosemide is not going to spare any of these electrolytes we're going to lose all of them so we do want to monitor closely our patients CMP our comprehensive metabolic profile and we want to look at these electrolytes and what are the balance with these electrolytes we do want to use caution any patients that are taking other antihypertensive they're taking ace inhibitors or ARBs we want to be careful to really monitor their blood pressure if we're also giving lasix so for example if you take your patient's blood pressure and let's say it's 140 over 80 and you do give your ACE inhibitor and then maybe an hour later you know the doctor the physician orders lasix or you have lasix ordered it would be really important to kind of monitor what your patient's blood pressure is prior to giving the lasix because the lasix can really decrease blood pressure greatly we want to make sure okay what happened from our our anti hypertensive and then what's happening now that we're giving the lasix and making sure we don't bottom out their blood pressure that's really the one of the biggest things I want you guys to keep in mind here is monitoring blood pressure very closely with giving any sort of lasix especially if we're giving it with other antihypertensives and I really want you to think electrolytes when you think about lasix one of the biggest questions you're going to see on NCLEX and nursing exams is going to be regarding lasix and potassium that is going to cause hypokalemia we're going to want to watch our patients EKG and monitor that EKG we're also going to want to monitor their their blood pressure and their urine output one of the questions we have on one of our practice exams refers to a patient with CHF who has a very low you're an output okay so what's happening here is a lot of people are reading the question and they're seeing a patient with low urine output and one of the options is to give the patient fluids now we would never want to do this with a patient with CHF the problem with CHF isn't low volume okay actually giving the patient fluids would put the patient in volume overload and actually be very detrimental to a CHF patient remember the retaining this volume with CHF so the appropriate option for a patient with CHF who has low urine output is to give lasix that would be a situation where laces will be given to try to help them get rid of this fluid now in a regular patient with low you're an output we might look at possibly giving the patient a quick bolus to try to see if they're able to get rid of that fluid but in a patient with CHF a more appropriate option would be to give lasix or to give diuretics try to help the patient rid their body of this of his excess fluid that they're not able to get rid of this has been another episode of the Med master podcast by n R s ng com to get our free cheat sheet cover the 50 most commonly prescribed medications head over to NRS ng comm slash 50 meds that's in our s and G comm slash 50 meds thank you so much for joining me today and thank you for being part of the NRS ng family we're here to help you succeed in nursing school and in life so start your journey today over a 10 RS ng comm slash 50 meds we're glad to have you aboard you know what time it is now it's time to go out and be your best self today happy nursing y'all you