let's do a quick Farm review on Vaso dilators and just as its name says it's going to cause Vaso dilation so we're going to open up those vessels some medications in this class include nitroglycerin minoxidil and hydroline now based on how these medications work they're going to be great at treating conditions where we have angina angina a lot of times is occurring because your coronary arteries are not getting good blood flow through them so they can't feed The myocardium so we can dilate let's say that vessel that's got narrowed we can increase the blood flow also it's helpful in heart failure which will help decrease the workload on the heart hypertension coronary artery disease pulmonary hypertension and peripheral vascular disease and how these medications work is that they dilate the vessels so whenever you're dilating a vessel what this does is that that's going to drop the overall blood pressure and this can help decrease the workload on your heart and your vascular system now this is a good thing if you need it to happen however it can lead to side effects so when you dilate what's going to happen it can cause side effects of hypotension it can also lead to Flushing a big thing like with nitroglycerin if you ever give it a sublingual you can see that the patient starts to get flushing in their face their face becomes red and they feel really hot also it can lead to those wonderful headaches like those nitroglycerin headaches orthostatic hypotension nausea vomiting reflex tachicardia and edema the nurse's role includes of course monitoring their blood pressure their heart rate and their ECG and assessing their status of their fleshing and if they've developed any swelling a lot of times we give these medications because the patient is having chest pain so whenever a patient has chest pain and you give these you want to stay with your patient and you want to assess how their chest pain is doing you want to look at where the location is is the location changing the onset the quality of the pain and the frequency plus while you're patients on these whenever they go to change positions you want to make sure you educate them on to do this very slowly because they could pass out okay so that wraps up this video over cardiac medications if you'd like to watch more videos in this pharmacology series you can access the link below