Nephrotoxic Medication | Commonly Prescribed Nephrotoxic Drugs and How to Check

Twenty percent of people (one in five people) is prescribed a nephrotoxic medication by their medical doctors– that’s a medication that is toxic to your kidneys.

We’re going to talk about how to protect yourself how to just double check to make sure your medication isn’t toxic. Now this is coming from the March 2020 clinical care journal and the study was titled use of nephrotoxic medication in adults with chronic kidney disease parallel courthood studies in Swedish and U.S kidney care routine care.

They did this study and they looked at Sweden and U.S and found very similar percentages. In the U.S it was 17 percent of people, in Sweden it was 20 percent of people get prescribed a nephrotoxic medication. Why is that? Human error, honest mistakes, doctors maybe don’t remember everything about your case, maybe they’re overworked or over-stressed.

Especially in today’s health care system, doctors are just overworked seeing way too many people. Honest mistakes are made unfortunately. So how do you double check yourself? So when you get prescribed medication, I don’t recommend looking up yourself unless you really have the proper resources, but you can always ask your pharmacist. Your pharmacist is a great resource for your medications. They’re not going to be checking all your meds and everything unless they’re asked to, so you just have to ask your pharmacist when you go to fill your script.

I’ve never had anybody having an issue with their pharmacist checking it so they’re generally very helpful in my experience and others so that’s what you want to do. Here are the classes of medications that were most prescribed that were very toxic. So the highest category was NSAIDs non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. These are over-the-counter and prescription. Some of the names include Aleve, ibuprofen, Motrin, Celebrex, Naproxen. High-dose aspirin is considered an NSAID and these are toxic to the kidney.

Eleven percent in Sweden and nine percent in the U.S got prescribed these drugs that were nephrotoxic. Next were antivirals. Some antivirals are not good for the kidney. Check with your pharmacist double check with your doctor. It’s really hard for you to look up everything and get accurate information because if you just look up your medication online and go to any website, it can be inaccurate. Even a lot of the popular ones are inaccurate. Website generally are made to get traffic so they’re not always accurate. So pharmacists, make sure you check with them.

Next we had immunosuppressants. So even though we use immunosuppressants for kidney transplants, if you’re given a improper immunosuppressant for your kidney situation it can be nephrotoxic and that’s also why we do blood work on a lot of these immunosuppressants to make sure you stay within a good range because if you take too much you can go out of range and it can be toxic. I have a kidney transplant and I take anti-rejection medication. If my medication goes out of range, it’s nephrotoxic. That’s why I do blood tests every three months to make sure my levels stay in range.

Next are Phenofibrates. These are a cholesterol-lowering medication all right. people get prescribed these low percentage though, not too many people.

Nephrotoxic medication is pretty commonly prescribed on accident, so you just want to always double check yourself. The takeaway of this video is always ask your pharmacist, get the pharmacist’s opinion.