Vitamins and Minerals for the NCLEX (A Rapid Review 💊💊) - Episode 64
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Some easy points that you can get on the boards. It's kind of like farm where I talk about their freebie questions, but it's not farm. It's actually vitamins and minerals. Their application, identification, uses, contraindication, side effects.

Same thing as pharm. So same approach that we have, but these are easy points if you see them and easy to correlate to different disease processes or treatments or side effects. So pick up these easy points, kind of little rapid review like I'm going to do with pharm here coming up in the next episode or so. So let's go through our water soluble vitamins. The first one is B1. B1 is thiamine.

We talk about this in alcoholism. So what does this cause? Wernicke-Korsakoff, Wernicke's encephalopathy. Encephalopathy being what? Encephalo being brain, pathy being pathology. And what happens in thiamine deficiency, in that alcoholism, is we get this receptive pathogen.

and expressive aphasia. So how do I describe that? Well, aphasia, the inability to understand, speak. We've got that receptive inability to understand speech and we've got that expressive inability to speak. So receptively, I don't understand what you're saying. Expressively, you don't know what I'm saying. So when you think about somebody who's had way too many to drink,

who is thiamine deficient at this point. Do you think you understand what they're saying while they're slurring all their words? Probably not. And do you think you're going to get through to them? Meaning are they going to be able to receive what you're saying? Probably not. That's that expressive and receptive aphasia. The next one is vitamin B3. Vitamin B3 is niacin. And this one is used for high cholesterol or hyperlipidemia. It is over the counter.

But the thing about this, it causes flushing. It's not an anaphylactic reaction. It's just flushing. So give them an NSAID. The next one I want to talk about is vitamin B9. Many of you know it as folate or folic acid. And when you think of folic acid, typically we think of what? Pregnancy.

So folic acid will help prevent neural tube defects. Do we start it when we get pregnant or when we have the thought of conception or we're trying to conceive? When we're trying to conceive. So we've got 400 to 800 micrograms a day. This is what we're looking at when we're taking our prenatals. The next one is vitamin B12, cobalamin.

Anybody that's out there knows my story where I talk about people that are out talking about and trying to educate about vitamins and minerals and what supplements they should take. And I talk about these people that are out there that have no education, but they look good. They've got a huge following and they call it cobalamin or cobalamin. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. It's cobalamin.

Make sure you do your due diligence when you listen to whoever is teaching you. Make sure they know what they're talking about or they're educated in what they're teaching you. Cobalamin, which is vitamin B12, can cause pernicious anemia, meaning if we don't have enough vitamin B12, we develop this pernicious anemia. We use B12 with an intrinsic factor to be able to be absorbed, but we develop

Neuropathy, if we don't have enough, we can develop memory loss as well to paresthesia. But the thing about vitamin B12 is it's in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, things of that nature. And we get stores for years. So if you decide to convert into veganism, then yeah, maybe you will develop it over years. But it's the people that are born into veganism.

These lifestyles that don't consume meat, poultry, fish, eggs, things of that nature that are going to actually be at risk for B12. So we supplement it. We supplement it. The next water soluble vitamin is vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid. And with this, the boards love to ask questions.

What works with it? Synergistically, it's iron. Iron absorption and vitamin C go hand in hand. So when we're talking about anemia or we're talking about vitamin C, think about taking them at the same time. But ultimately, our overall health is super important because I am a huge fan of all these natural vitamins and minerals.

which leads me to talk about something that I consume on a daily basis. Day and night, I'm consuming this product called Magic Mind. I'm talking about for focus during the day and sleep during the night. And I literally take a shot in the morning, a shot in the night. It's all natural. And during the day, it's got this like time released caffeine. So it keeps me super focused.

And at nighttime, and you can imagine my mind goes a million miles an hour, I need to unwind and relax. So I take the sleep version of this at nighttime. The fact of Magic Mind is it's studied by 200 different scientific studies behind every single ingredient in there, which is huge. And it's doctor validated. So not only that, but they're also donating, and those of you that know me,

You know that I'm a big fan of mental health. I'm a huge, huge advocate of mental health. They're even donating proceeds from each bottle sold to mental health charities to help different communities around the US. So some of the things that I'm really, really big on in here is they've got that ashwagandha, that time release caffeine, some lion's mane.

These are things that are natural that are going to help our health. And right now to our students, you can get the both packs, the focus, the daytime one and the sleep bundle for 45% off to our students, 45% off to our students at magicmind.com slash high yield Jan, high yield Jan, J-A-N as in January,

for 45% off for Magic Mind. Now we move on to our fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, K. And there's a lot of great mnemonics in order to remember them, but A, D, E, K, it's not too hard to remember four of these fat soluble vitamins, starting with vitamin A. So the thing about these vitamins is that they are stored in fat. Because they're stored in fat,

we can develop toxicity because we don't just rid of them. They stay in our system. So the more and more we consume, the more and more they build up. So toxicity is a big deal with both of these. The first one, arguably the most important one tested on the boards is vitamin A. And it's not that it's just for vision or deficiency can cause night blindness.

The real part is the derivatives of vitamin A. The derivatives of vitamin A are going to be used for acne, especially isotretinoin. That is the highest yield drug in this entire lecture that you should know. Why? Isotretinoin is a vitamin A derivative. It's a retinoid.

And the thing about this is because it's used for acne, think about the population that's used for acne. We're talking about potentially starting from teenage years where hormones take off, moving on up. Meaning that a population of women consuming isotretinoin because of acne needs to be educated because this is highly, highly teratogenic.

So we have to make sure that they are not pregnant. We must do a pregnancy test in order to rule out pregnancy because it is so teratogenic. If we decide to start them on it, we must educate them that they must be on two forms of birth control. Two forms of birth control. We must monitor their LFTs. We must monitor their lipid panel.

This is a drug that causes photosensitivity. So remember the mnemonic SAT for a photo. Okay, hold on one second. Actually, we're about to change SAT for a photo up. Those of you that remember SAT for a photo, it's sulfa, amiodarone, tetracyclines, the F we added in for fluoroquinolones, SAT for a photo, meaning photosensitivity,

but the brand name is Accutane. So what I'm going to do, this is like on the spot while I'm making this podcast, is what we're going to do is we're going to add in Sulfa, obviously is there. And with amiodarone, let's add in Accutane.

So sat for a photo. So sat is going to be two A's. It's going to be amiodarone and Accutane and tetracyclines. The F we added in those of you that watch the weekly zoom, I did that on the spot as well too. Um, we're going to add in that F for fluoroquinolones and for a photo,

Because all of these drugs cause photosensitivity, which means we must educate our patients. We must educate them. Wear a hat. Wear long-sleeved clothes. Don't go out in the sun without sunscreen. As a matter of fact, if you can avoid the sun, avoid the sun. Don't go out to the beach. Don't go out to those outdoor concerts. Avoid the sun because it causes photosensitivity.

So again, SAT for a photo, we're going to modify that. We'll update that on our website and all that good stuff on our quick tips as well too. So we're going to make that SAT with two A's for amiodarone and Accutane, which is isotretinoin. The next one is vitamin D. Vitamin D helps with calcium absorption, so it helps with the bones. Use vitamin D and calcium at the same time.

The last one is, I'm going to skip vitamin E, but I'm going to go into vitamin K. Vitamin K, we're talking about blood clotting because what is it the antidote to? Warfarin. So again, when you see vitamin K, more than likely you're going to see it in a question regarding the antidote for warfarin overdose. The major minerals that we're going to talk about, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium. We touched on iron.

And we'll end it off with zinc. So starting with calcium, again, we talked about that with vitamin D, bone health. But calcium also is predominantly responsible for the atrium portion of the heart. So we're looking at dysrhythmias. We're looking at nerve conduction. We're also talking about tetany when we're dealing with hypocalcemia.

hypocalcemia when we get rid of the parathyroids potentially in a thyroidectomy. So how do we see tetany? Chovstek sign, Trousseau sign. Then magnesium. We talk about magnesium in a couple of different places and I get into this in depth more but we're just kind of doing a little rapid review here. But magnesium we talk about it in diuretics, in alcohol, alcoholism.

where we're losing so much magnesium, we develop these tremors or these shakes. Think about somebody that's hungover. They've depleted their magnesium. They've peed it out because they were drinking so much. Or somebody that is on a diuretic that pees it out because they're on a diuretic and they get tremors. So that nerve stability is big with magnesium. But that nerve stability also comes in the form of the brain.

the nerves in the brain, that neurological stability in where preeclampsia to prevent seizures, neurological stability. So magnesium, potassium, again, hypo or hyperkalemic. I talk about this with AskGraph. The big one is going to be V-fib, V-fib, V-fib. And the last one is sodium. The big one is when somebody becomes severely hyponatremic.

meaning their sodium levels are like 120 when they should be between 135 and 145, but they've severely dropped with whatever reason, some sort of water intoxication, whether it be some endocrinology, endocrinological issue. But ultimately what we're worried about is seizures. We're worried about seizures. And again, we talk about this in depth in the on-demand or in the course.

because we talk about this in endocrine, we talk about this in pediatric nutrition, we talk about this in a lot of different places, in a lot of different places, while talking about hyponatremia and seizures. So ultimately,

ending it with zinc with minerals and all over in the news articles coming out I'm sure on social media people talk about the importance of zinc and help building that immune system