How to Learn Diuretic Drugs for Nursing

Having trouble remembering the different diuretic medications for nursing? Or maybe you don’t feel like you have enough time to study them all? Between the Loop Diuretics, Thiazides, Spironolactone, and Mannitol, there are many facts that any nursing student or practicing nurse needs to keep straight in their head. In this post, I’ll share my visual memory aid to easily learn and remember all the diuretics 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.

Visual Mnemonic for Loop Diuretics

Whenever you need to study large amounts of information like the diuretic drugs, I suggest chunking the information and focusing on one drug class at a time. Watch our video below for a mnemonic to remember the Loop Diuretics, a class of drugs that includes the drugs furosemide, torsemide, and bumetanide. You can view the accompanying image here.

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

Loop diuretics (loop rollercoaster) are powerful diuretics (peeing pants) that include furosemide (fur), bumetanide (boombox), and torsemide (tours guide). These drugs work by inhibiting the sodium-potassium-chloride triple transporter in the ascending limb of the loop of henle. This decreases the medullary concentration gradient, preventing water reabsorption. The net effect of loop diuretics is increased excretion of water, sodium, and potassium. Because of their potent diuretic effects, loop diuretics are often used in the treatment of volume overload states as well as in the treatment of hypertension.  Important side effects to note include ototoxicity (covering ears), sulfa allergy, as well as severe hypotension and hypovolemia, which may result in contraction alkalosis and even acute kidney injury! Because these drugs increase potassium excretion, loop diuretics are notorious for causing hypokalemia (falling banana peel). Lastly, like most other diuretics, loop diuretics can increase uric acid levels to increase the risk of gout.

Just remember our loop de loop roller coaster in the theme park, and you’ll be set to remember all the key facts about  the Loop Diuretics 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 diuretic drugs. This includes all the different drug classes, like Loop Diuretics, Thiazides, Mannitol, 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.