Magnesium Sulfate (MgSO4) - Preeclampsia, Eclampsia , Gestational hypertension, seizure, Convulsions

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Pharmarmacology in one minute with medicosis. Today we'll talk about magnesium sulfate. Why do we use it? It has many different uses. One of them is to treat and or prevent seizures because magnesium sulfate inhibits nerve impulse transmission. One of the conditions treated using magnesium sulfate is eclamsia. Have you ever wondered where this word came from? E means out as in ectopic, ectropion, excision, ectomy, ectokeleton etc. Lamsia means to flash.

[00:00:29]So eclamsia literally means to flash out. Flash out what? Seizures or convulsions. So what is ecleia? Eclamsia is preeacclampsia plus seizures. So if you remove the seizures from the equation then the eclamsia is no longer eclamsia but rather preeacclampsia. So what is preeacclampsia? It's the condition before eclamsia. What do you mean? It means that we have a pregnant woman with hypertension defined as blood pressure over 140 over 90 whose onset happened after the 20th week of gestation plus proteinura. When all of this is present, we call this preeacclampsia. When seizure erupts on top of all of that, we call it eclamsia.

[00:01:09]Now, how do you diagnose eclamsia? You need to diagnose the seizure and diagnose the hypertension. How do you treat eclamsia? Treat the seizure and treat the hypertension. Duh. How do we treat the seizure? The answer is magnesium sulfate. Why does it inhibit nerve transmission? How does it treat seizure?