 Let's continue on and get a little more in-depth on our anti-hypertensive medications. So today we're going to discuss calcium channel blockers. Calcium channel blockers work by blocking the voltage dependent L-type calcium channels of the cardiac and the smooth muscle. What does that do? That's going to decrease the muscle contractility. So what is going to happen here is if you see down in the bottom right hand of the screen, we have a L-type calcium channel in this illustration. The calcium channel blockers are going to be like this red arrow here, and they're going to go in there physically going to block the calcium channel. If we're not able to allow calcium through that channel, that cell is not going to have enough calcium inside of the cell that will allow those muscles to depolarize and contract. Without the depolarization and contraction of the muscle, then the contractility will be decreased. So what do we use it for? Well, calcium channel blockers are broken down into a couple different categories. You have the dihydropyridines, you have nemotapine, nicartapine, and clavitapine, and then we have the non-dihydropyridines. So for the dihydropyridines, we'll use this in hypertension and in angina. For nemotapine, that is specifically going to be useful in subarachnoid hemorrhage. For nicartapine and clavitapine, we're going to use this during hypertensive urgency and emergency situations. And then finally, our non-dihydropyridines are going to be used in hypertension, angina, and then as well as atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. The difference between the dihydropyridines and the non-dihydropyridines is that the dihydropyridines act only on smooth muscle. The non-dihydropyridines act on the heart. So what are some adverse effects or side effects that can be associated with calcium channel blockers? Well, we can have gingival hyperplasia, which is a overgrowth of the gingiva in your mouth. Dihydropyridine blockers can actually cause peripheral edema, flushing, and dizziness. And then our non-dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers can cause a cardiac depression because remember it's acting on the heart. It can cause AV blocks, hyperprolactinemia, specifically verampimil. And we can also see constipation associated with our non-dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers. So some examples of the dihydropyridines and the non-dihydropyridines, amlodipine, clavitapine, necartapine, nefetapine, and nemotapine are all our dihydropyridines. And our non-dihydropyridines are diltizum and verampimil.