How to Learn Lipid Lowering Drugs for Nursing

Having trouble remembering the different cholesterol lowering medications for nursing? Or maybe you don’t feel like you have enough time to study them all? Between the Statins, Fibrates, Ezetimibe, and more, there are over a dozen different drug names that any nursing student or practicing nurse needs to know. In this post, I’ll share my visual memory aid to master all the lipid lowering drugs for nursing school and the NCLEX. This technique will not only save you time, but it has been proven to improve your ability to retain and recall the information. Get ready to easily master all the lipid lowering drugs (and have fun doing it!)

Visual Mnemonic for Statins

Since there’s a lot of different cholesterol lowering medications, I suggest chunking the information and focusing on one drug class at a time. Watch our video below for a mnemonic to remember the Statins, a class of drugs that includes the drugs atorvastatin, simvastatin, rosuvastatin, and lovastatin. You can view the accompanying image here.

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

Statins (satin), also called HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (HaMburGer CoolAid Reduction Inhibited), are easy to recognize by their “-statin” ending. Some examples of statins include lovastatin, simvastatin, and atorvastatin. These drugs decrease cholesterol synthesis (decreased grease synthesis) in the liver, causing HDL levels to rise (raising huddle), and LDL levels to fall (falling ladle). In addition, statins lower triglyceride levels (falling tri-glass oil). Statins are lipid-lowering drugs (lipid lowering sticker) and can be helpful in the prevention of heart attack and stroke (“Prevents Heart Attack and Stroke”) . As a side effect, statins may cause myopathy (muscle injury) which, if left untreated, can progress into rhabdomyolysis (“Rhambo” with muscle injury) , a life-threatening medical emergency. Other side effects include liver damage (damaged lever) , rash (rash) , nausea and vomiting (vomiting) , and headache (headache) . Statins are teratogenic (tarantula), meaning they can cause birth defects and should generally not be used during pregnancy. As the nurse, teach your patients to avoid grapefruit juice (no grapefruit juice) while taking statins. You should also teach them that statins are most effective when taken at night (nighttime).

Just remember our nighttime run to the fast food joint in our satin pajamas, and you’ll be set to remember all the key facts about  the Statins on test day.

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 lipid lowering drugs. This includes all the different drug classes, like Fibrates, Ezetimibe, Niacin, and more. In conclusion, visual mnemonics are a powerful tool for any nursing student or nurse seeking to strengthen their grasp of pharmacology, all while saving time . See the full catalog of Pixorize’s Nursing School mnemonics here.