Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

You can certainly track me down on LinkedIn or at MedEd101.com as well. Just hit the contact button there and shoot me a message.

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, this is the Real Life Pharmacology podcast,

of course. You can go to real life pharmacology.com and hit the free top 200 study guide

in the upper right hand corner of the page. Go ahead and subscribe there and you will get updates when we've got a new podcast

available. So definitely go check that out. Get your free 31 page PDF too on the top 200 drugs.

Great little refresher and or little study guide if you're preparing for pharmacology or board exam.

So go check that out.

So let's get into the drug of the day today, and that is simvastatin.

So if you've listened to every podcast episode, which I'm guessing most of you probably haven't,

but you may remember that we did cover statins in general. And I wanted to branch out and dig a little bit deeper on some

of these individual agents because there are subtle differences amongst the statin agents.

So with that said, the mechanism of action of simvastatin brand name Zocor is going to be the same.

As I covered before, it inhibits HMG COA reductase.

If you remember, this is the rate limiting step in basically producing cholesterol.

Okay.

And that's ultimately going to lower LDL production.

And when we do those, when we check our blood for cholesterol levels, hopefully with the use of the

medication, those levels will be reduced. But I'll talk a little bit further about monitoring

parameters. Use of this medication, lowering cardiovascular risk, lowering cholesterol,

and things of that nature, of course.

So uniquely, let's talk about some quirks with sympastatin.

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