How to Learn Cardiovascular Drugs for Medical School

Struggling to learn cardiovascular pharmacology? It’s quite easy to get facts confused between the statins, calcium channel blockers, nitrates, hydralazine, and over a dozen more heart drugs! In this post, I’ll share a visual memory aid to master all the cardiovascular drugs for medical school exams like the USMLE Step 1 or Step 2, COMLEX Level 1 and Level 2, or NBME shelf exams. This technique can help you save time studying, all the while achieving the score you want on exam day.

Visual Mnemonic for Ivabradine

Since there’s a lot of different heart drugs, I suggest chunking the information and focusing on one drug class at a time. Watch our video below for a mnemonic to remember Ivabradine, a drug used to treat chest pain unresponsive to other drugs. You can view the accompanying image here.

In short, we’ve put all the information about Ivabradine into a single picture mnemonic. Here’s a summary of the facts for Ivabradine we covered in the mnemonic above:

Ivabradine (ivy braidin’) is a medication used to treat chest pain (treating chest pain) and heart failure (fixing broken heart pump). It works by blocking funny sodium channels (blocking funny salt chute) in pacemaker cells. This prolongs the slow depolarization (increasing time of slow de-polarize mode) of the cell, causing a lengthening of phase 4 of the pacemaker action potential (lengthening slope of 4×4 truck). Side effects of ivabradine include seeing luminous phenomena (bright lights) and bradycardia (slow heart-shaped turtle). Hypertension (inflating blood pressure cuff) may also occur as a rare side effect.

Just remember our beach wedding with the Ivy Braidin’ and the funny clown salt chute, and you’ll be set for test day.

How to Remember Nitroprusside

As I mentioned above, it is easier to learn the different diabetes drugs if you break the information up into smaller pieces. This follows a memory phenomenon known as chunking, which is why phone numbers are broken up (e.g. 1-800-867-5309 compared to 18008675309).

As such, we’ve separated the different cardiac drugs into separate mnemonics. Watch the below video for our mnemonic for Nitroprusside. The interactive image for review can be found here.

Once again, here’s all the facts we’ve covered for Nitroprusside above:

Nitroprusside (nitro pressurized) is a medication used primarily to treat hypertensive emergencies (deflating high blood emergency) by lowering blood pressure (deflating blood pressure cuff). Nitroprusside works in the body to increase cyclic GMP (increased cycling GraMPs) through the release of nitric oxide (releasing NO gas) in blood vessels, which eventually causes vasodilation (dilating vessel-like hose). Notably, nitroprusside causes nearly equal dilation of both arteries and veins (equal dilation of red and blue hose). The drug is short acting (short timer) with effects on the body usually lasting less than 10 minutes. At high doses, nitroprusside can cause the side effect of cyanide toxicity (cyanide toxin).

Picture yourself in our coffee shop getting a pour of the latest nitro pressurized brew and you’ll have Nitroprusside under wraps.

Use Image Learning to Score Higher

So why does this all work? Well, our brain is better at remembering pictures than words. This is known as the picture superiority effect, and you can take advantage of this by using visual mnemonics to remember facts. But making images like this takes time, which is why Pixorize has already made video mnemonics for all of the different cardiovascular drugs. This includes all the different drug names, like Insulins, Sulfonylureas, Metformin, TZDs, SGLT2 Inhibitors, Alpha-Glucosidase Inhibitors, Pramlintide, and more. In conclusion, visual mnemonics are a powerful asset for students seeking to strengthen their grasp of pharmacology. See the full catalog of Pixorize’s USMLE Step 1 and 2 mnemonics here.