need help with DI

[hotpepper]

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I really need help with drug interactions. My school sucks, they do top200 drug class as a self taught class, so I am stuck here on my own trying to figure out drug interactions.
I have few books (Kaplan notes, Katzung, Goodman and Gilman and few others), and I looked through all of them. None of the abovementioned books explains well drug interactions. For example, Calcium Channel Blockers, each drug in this class has like 50 DI on Lexi-comp... How am I supposed to memorize it all? Is there a general idea on Drig Interaction with CCB?
I pretty much, need DI for every single class. If there is no info in those books where do I get the info on all of the classes?

 

[Sparda29]

I really need help with drug interactions. My school sucks, they do top200 drug class as a self taught class, so I am stuck here on my own trying to figure out drug interactions.
I have few books (Kaplan notes, Katzung, Goodman and Gilman and few others), and I looked through all of them. None of the abovementioned books explains well drug interactions. For example, Calcium Channel Blockers, each drug in this class has like 50 DI on Lexi-comp... How am I supposed to memorize it all? Is there a general idea on Drig Interaction with CCB?
I pretty much, need DI for every single class. If there is no info in those books where do I get the info on all of the classes?

We had a class dedicated for drug interactions. No way you are going to memorize all of them. The trick is to memorize interactions for the different classes of drugs. What drugs are metabolized in what ways.

If two drugs are both metabolized by the liver, chances are they probably interact, you just gotta figure out how serious the interaction is. Most of the time, the interactions are not serious and are just caution/monitor.

 

[Praziquantel86]

What year of school are you in? Drug interactions are typically something that you pick up during the curriculum, after you learn about the pharmacology, kinetics and dynamics of a drug. It's obviously impossible to have every possible drug interaction memorized. There are a few idiosyncratic reactions that may pop up (pseudotumor cerebri with tetracyclines and retinoic acid comes to mind) that you'll learn along the way. Most, though, are predictable with a firm knowledge of the drugs and their actions.

Your job as a pharmacist will be to identify the potential for an interaction, and then looking further to see if one actually exists and what its significance is. Pharmacy school is four years long for a reason (hard to tell sometimes), and this is a good chunk of that reason.

 

[supertreat]

These were not covered very well in my cirriculum and it will largely be based on what you do as a pharmacist. The types of interactions you should know by memory are a lot different for an oncology pharmacist than a retail pharmacist and this will also differ by patient population. Use the annoying software warnings as when prompted and look everything up using lexi comp - that's what I've done starting out and it's helped me learn what's important and what you can ignore. There's so many interactions there's no way to memorize them **I use lexicomp online or PDA software using the interaction tool - it's much better than just reading that long list under each drug**

 

[supertreat]

I really need help with drug interactions. My school sucks, they do top200 drug class as a self taught class, so I am stuck here on my own trying to figure out drug interactions.
I have few books (Kaplan notes, Katzung, Goodman and Gilman and few others), and I looked through all of them. None of the abovementioned books explains well drug interactions. For example, Calcium Channel Blockers, each drug in this class has like 50 DI on Lexi-comp... How am I supposed to memorize it all? Is there a general idea on Drig Interaction with CCB?
I pretty much, need DI for every single class. If there is no info in those books where do I get the info on all of the classes?

Oh and to answer your question about CCBs. The ones that I deal with that I see the most interactions are the non-dihydropyridines CCBs (verapamil and diltiazem)l. They interact with commonly prescribed statins etc.

 

[ucrx]

I really need help with drug interactions. My school sucks, they do top200 drug class as a self taught class, so I am stuck here on my own trying to figure out drug interactions.
I have few books (Kaplan notes, Katzung, Goodman and Gilman and few others), and I looked through all of them. None of the abovementioned books explains well drug interactions. For example, Calcium Channel Blockers, each drug in this class has like 50 DI on Lexi-comp... How am I supposed to memorize it all? Is there a general idea on Drig Interaction with CCB?
I pretty much, need DI for every single class. If there is no info in those books where do I get the info on all of the classes?

www.drug-interactions.com has a pretty good chart of CYP interactions that links to publications and is helpful in determining what interactions could be significant. I wouldn't bother memorizing the lists of interactions in lexi or anything like that because many aren't significant. You'll learn the interactions as you learn pk, pharmacology, etc. Do you have quizzes or exams? What information are you required to know? My school had quizzes on the top 200 drugs from flash cards, and we were just required to know specific parts of the cards. This was self-taught, but it was in P3 year so we had covered most of the drugs already in other classes.