Diuretics

Diuretics are medicines that increase the excretion of sodium and water in urine. They reduce fluid volume and are used chiefly to treat high blood pressure and fluid retention.

Loop diuretics: Diuretics that inhibit sodium-potassium-chloride transport in the kidney’s thick ascending limb. They produce strong salt and water loss by blocking a major reabsorption pathway.
Hypertension: Persistently elevated arterial blood pressure that increases the risk of cardiovascular and kidney disease. Thiazide-type diuretics are commonly used to lower blood pressure.
Renal physiology: The study of how the kidneys filter blood, regulate body fluids, and produce urine. Diuretics modify the transport processes that renal physiology describes.
Hypokalemia: An abnormally low concentration of potassium in the blood. Loop and thiazide diuretics can increase urinary potassium loss.
Vasopressin receptor antagonists: Drugs that block vasopressin receptors, reducing water reabsorption in the kidney collecting ducts. They primarily increase water excretion, unlike most diuretics that increase sodium excretion.
Thiazide diuretics: Diuretics that inhibit sodium-chloride transport in the kidney’s distal convoluted tubule. Their transport target explains their effects on blood pressure and calcium handling.
Heart failure: A syndrome in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs or does so only at elevated filling pressures. Loop diuretics relieve fluid congestion, though they do not by themselves correct the underlying heart dysfunction.
Glomerular filtration: The movement of water and small solutes from glomerular blood into the kidney tubule. Most diuretics must reach the tubular fluid to act at their target sites.
Hyponatremia: An abnormally low concentration of sodium in the blood relative to water. Some diuretics can disrupt water and sodium balance enough to lower blood sodium.
Ultrafiltration: A procedure that removes excess fluid from blood across a semipermeable membrane using a pressure gradient. It removes fluid mechanically rather than changing kidney tubular transport.

Linked from 7 pages