Simplified Hyponatremia Workup for New Nurse Practitioners
Sep 17, 2019
I saw a meme recently that compared hyponatremia to folding a fitted sheet— you can watch a million videos on how to do it but you're probably going to crumple it up and hope you never have to deal with it. 🤯
Luckily in primary care low sodium is easier to deal with outpatient, and doesn't have to be super complicated.
In today's video I'll be talking about low sodium, one of the top abnormal labs in primary care.
Hyponatremia involves understanding kidney function, but I've broken it down the simplest, clearest, most digestible way to give you the most helpful insight to take into your practice.
I'll bring you through the steps for the vast majority of patients you'll see, and if you need to go down the rabbit hole of workup further what we go into in this video, you'll have the tools to do so.
Workup for Low Sodium in Primary Care
You'll learn:
- How to know when your patients needs to go to the ER, and when you can work them up outpatient
- The simplest way to remember low sodium
- The #1 lab you should always think of when you see low sodium
- How to know if your patient needs IV fluid (or if that'd be the worst possible thing to do for them)
QUICK NOTE: I made an error in the algorithm slide #2 (25:22 timestamp), serum uric acid is going to be LOW in SIADH and HIGHER in states of fluid overload (CHF, etc). So the opposite of what I say on that slide. So sorry about that!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Lab Interpretation Crash Course
If you liked this episode, it's a sneak preview of how we cover labs inside our comprehensive Lab Interpretation Crash Course. It covers CBC, CMP, Urinalysis, Dipstick & Microscopy, TSH, Lipids & top Endocrine labs in primary care, and comes with lifetime access and continuing education credits! Check it out here.
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