Top 50 Must-Know Drug Classes for the PTCB Exam!

Pharmacology for Technicians

Pharmacology forms a relatively major component of the PTCB test – accounting for 11 questions out of a total of 80 questions. That’s why it’s essential that you learn the top drug classes for the PTCB exam.

For many aspiring pharmacy technicians, pharmacology can prove their undoing.

Pharmacology for technicians isn’t overly detailed. That said, there are a lot of details that you need to know.

For example:

• The most commonly used medicines in the pharmacy setting
• Knowing both generic and trade names of drugs
• What those medicines are used to treat – their ‘indications’
• How those drugs work; their ‘mechanism of action’
• Clinically significant side effects and drug interactions
• Scheduled drugs and what specific schedules refer to

One of the best ways to learn pharmacology for the PTCB exam is to generate flashcards. Flashcards are an enormously powerful tool that let you commit to memory the relevant, essential facts about drugs and medicines. You can also take flashcards on the go, learning when and where you need to.

Below, we’ve gone one step further – putting together the top 50 drug classes for the PTCB exam.

Knowing about drug classes is important. They tell you how the drug works and for what purpose the drug is used. Once you learn what drug class a medicine belongs to, it makes learning about pharmacology that much easier. In other words, it offers a framework onto which you can build your knowledge further. When you take PTCB practice tests, drug classes come up time and time again.

Without further ado, then, let’s review these top 50 PTCB drug classes!

50 Drug Classes to Know for the PTCB Exam

Bear in mind, that many drug classes are used for different purposes.

Take beta blockers, for example. Beta blockers are used to treat a wide variety of conditions including angina, atrial fibrillation, hypertension, glaucoma, and congestive heart failure. Below in the table, then, you may find that ‘beta blockers’ are listed under the ‘antihypertensive drug’ class, though beta blockers are not limited to this use.

Bear these considerations in mind – that a drug class is often used for more than one purpose and, to add an extra layer of complexity, not all drugs within that class are used for the same purpose. To take the example of beta blockers, one member of that drug class may be used to treat glaucoma, but another drug is used to treat atrial fibrillation.

All beta blockers are, however, all identified with having the suffix –lol. Examples include atenolol, metoprolol, bisoprolol, and timolol.