Amlodipine is a popular prescription medication used to treat high blood pressure.
Hey this is curtis alexander i’m a pharmacist in today’s video what i’m going to talk about is the side effects that we can see with amlodipine and in case you know or don’t know him lodipine also goes by the brand name norvasc and it’s used primarily for people with high blood pressure so the most important thing i harp on this a lot if you want to understand what
Side effects you could see why they might be happening it does help to understand what it’s actually doing in your body so let’s start with that so when you take amlodipine it’s a calcium channel blocker and to give you a better overview i covered this in my video on pemf but your body’s electrical right so you have gradients in your body that produce voltage-gated
Channels they have to reach a certain potential to let calcium and these things into the cell you see that in an ekg if the doctor wants to look at your heart then the ekg is a measurement of electrical potential essentially in your body nor vascular is going to or amylotipine is going to affect that so when it blocks these calcium channels the calcium won’t get
Into the cell during the depolarization component of your heartbeat the end result is that you’re going to get a lowering in your blood vessel resistance you’ll get a dilation as you get a blood vessel dilation your blood pressure will go down which is what we’re trying to have happen with amlodipines so so far so good now what sort of side effects do we see by
Far and away the most common one is going to be edema or you’re going to carry more water you’re going to get that edema skin that people can see so what is going on there’s a big range we can see this in anywhere from two up to 15 percent of people who take amlodipine and what we see is that your body because of this vasodilation that’s causing the decreased
Blood pressure your body will react by moving fluids from the capillaries to what’s called the interstitial space or basically the space between your cells and so you will start retaining or holding onto water hence the edema now there are certain groups of people that are going to be at higher risk for seeing edema one of which is females will be at a higher
Risk they’re going to be more up to this 10 to 15 percent um the higher of dose you get anywhere from two and a half to five milligrams is going to be lower once you get up into that 10 milligrams a day range of amlodipine then you could be falling into that range okay people with diabetes are going to have a tougher time with edema just because of what diabetes
Does in the body there tends to be issues handling some of that movement and fluids in the first place and then as far as the edema it can show up usually within four weeks and the longer you’re on it we tend to see a higher incidence upwards around that six month mark so those are some of the risk factors that you’d be looking at that will point you to a higher
Incidence of that water retention okay there’s some other side effects that you need to know about um not common most of these are less than five percent you can experience heart palpitations again this is going to be dose related we see more of it at the 10 milligram dose also again going to be more common in females okay fatigue is something we can see in around
Five percent of people um again this is probably related back to the vasodilation we see this in some of the other blood pressure meds like metoprolol which i made a video on that as well people can get the blahs the fatigue the tiredness there’s a few others you can experience flushing only three percent of people nausea three percent of people and dizziness
Again this is going to be more related to the dose that you’re on the higher the dose the more you’ll experience dizziness but again not a huge huge rate at which these are occurring it’s just good for you to know one thing i do want to talk about if you look at the literature if you look at the studies they’ll say constipation only happens in roughly one percent
Of people in my experience just talking to patients who’ve taken it i see it occur more often than that calcium channel blockers as a whole um are kind of known for causing it so i just wanted to throw that out there that sometimes in the real world we do see a little higher incidence of constipation but far and away your big side effect with amyloid pain is
Going to be the edema so keep some of those risk factors in mind if you’ve taken amlodipine you know mention it in the comments because i think that’s helpful for other people to learn from your experience taking the medication and of course if there’s other video ideas you have you know drop them in the comments that would be great so i hope this was helpful i
Appreciate your feedback in the comments and until the next one this is curtis alexander thanks
Transcribed from video
Amlodipine Side Effects: Are You At Higher Risk? By Curtis Alexander Pharm.D.
