Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I am your host pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

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the top 200 drugs. Great little study guide. Great review if you're out in practice.

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All right, drug of the day today is Ipoetan alpha.

Brand name of this medication is epigen, pro kit, reticrit.

This is a medication I've definitely seen used in practice. I would say I've seen maybe less use as time has gone on because we've seen

warnings and different things come out with this medication. So it definitely has to be used wisely and judiciously.

And so hopefully I can teach you some clinical practice pearls

with the use of this medication.

All right, so you'll often hear clinicians talk about ESAs.

So that's erythropoesis stimulating agents.

And there are other medications within this class, but one of those is epaweeton Alpha, or

epigen is probably the most common brand name I here used.

So as the name implies, they stimulate erythropoesis. So essentially the drugs

stimulate the production of red blood cells. The drug causes the release of reticulocytes

from bone marrow. So if you remember reticulocytes are basically

kind of precursors or immature red blood cells that eventually mature to erythrocytes. And long

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