High-five* for Phoebe

Shout out to the pharmacy team at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital Pharmacy! For its “outstanding response during the Covid-19 pandemic,” PPMHP’s corporate director of pharmacy services, Marty Kelvas, was given the Georgia Society of Health System Pharmacists’ 2020 Outstanding Community Volunteer Service Award.

Note: Technically this is Covid-free Friday, but these folks — and, let’s face it, a heck of a lot more of you all — deserve the kudos.

* Virtual. No touching.

Cannabis vs OCD

It seems that smoking a joint can reduce the symptoms of OCD — or so report Washington State University researchers. (Marijuana is fully legal out there.)

After smoking cannabis, users with OCD reported it reduced their compulsions by 60%, intrusions, or unwanted thoughts, by 49% and anxiety by 52%.

Interesting notes: First, it only appears to result in short-term relief. Second, the higher the concentration of CBD — not THC — the greater the effect.

“The results overall indicate that cannabis may have some beneficial short-term but not really long-term effects on obsessive-compulsive disorder,” said the lead author, but, “To me, the CBD findings are really promising.”

Two dementia stories

1) If you eat soy products — and have the right gut biome — it could reduce your risk of dementia. Subjects in a Japanese study whose gut bacteria produced equol* from digesting soy “display lower levels of white matter lesions within the brain.”

2) IBM and Pfizer have trained an AI to detect signs of Alzheimer’s from — ready? — patients’ writing samples. And it’s 70 percent accurate. How’d they do it? With data from the Framingham Heart Study, “which has been tracking the health of more than 14,000 people from three generations since 1948.”

IBM says its main AI model was able to detect linguistic features that are sometimes related to early signs of cognitive impairment. They include certain misspellings, repeated words and the use of simplified phrases rather than grammatically complex sentences†.

* “An isoflavandiol estrogen metabolized from daidzein,” as you undoubtedly knew
† Yes, feel free to make jokes about the candidates of your choice. We all know that’s where your mind went.

Antibiotics: Oral works just fine

After a fracture, the chance of reinfection or additional surgery is no worse with oral antibiotics than with those given by IV. Simple enough, right. But, if you want to sound all science-y, put it this way:

“With associated congruent reinfection and reoperation rates, oral antibiotics are noninferior to IV antibiotics for fracture-related infections.”

I have to wonder: After a first date, would this guy say, “I find our initial congruent temporal association to have been noninferior to comparable experiences”? Probably.

Dietary news

Eat me

“High flavanol diets may lead to lower blood pressure” — from the University of Reading. “People who consume a diet including flavanol-rich foods and drinks, including tea, apples and berries, could lead to lower blood pressure.”

Drink me

“Drinking green tea and coffee daily linked to lower death risk in people with diabetes” — from Kyushu University. Drinking four or more cups (i.e., two or more typical mugs) of green tea and at least one mug of coffee was “linked to 63% lower all cause mortality.”

Skin in the game

Someday soon you might be able to have the skin of a newborn, and not in a creepy way at all. Washington State University researchers have found a genetic factor “that acts like a molecular switch in the skin of baby mice.”

The switch is mostly turned off after skin forms and remains off in adult tissue. When it was activated in specialized cells in adult mice, their skin was able to heal wounds without scarring. The reformed skin even included fur and could make goose bumps, an ability that is lost in adult human scars.

Don’t get too excited, though: “A lot of work still needs to be done before this latest discovery in mice can be applied to human skin, but this is a foundational advance.”

CBD, hemp, and what the DEA is saying

Congress wanted to help the hemp industry. Hemp isn’t marijuana, although they are related. So in the Agriculture Improvement Act (AIA) of 2018 it removed hemp from the definition of marijuana, and gave control of regulating hemp from the DEA to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

If it has a THC concentration of “not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis,” it was considered “hemp” and regulation went to USDA.

The pharma connection: This also applies to CBD products. And in 2019, the DEA told industry that …

… after a review of the AIA, it determined that synthetic cannabinols (CBD) containing less than 0.3% Δ9-THC met the definition of “hemp” and therefore were no longer scheduled drugs under the CSA.

So synthetic CBD was also cool, as long as it had little to no THC.

But now DEA has issued a interim final rule … and seems to be saying the opposite. Any synthetically derived tetrahydrocannabinols, it said, remain schedule I drugs, even if the THC is less than 0.3%.

“For synthetically derived tetrahydrocannabinols, the concentration of Δ9-THC is not a determining factor in whether the material is a controlled substance.” Thus, all synthetic forms of cannabis and its derivatives, regardless of the Δ9-THC content, are still subject to DEA control.

So a lot of CBD makers — not to mention hemp growers and producers — are very, very upset, especially since the DEA skipped the whole ‘notice and comment’ period to let people know about this. Cue the lawsuits.

Read it all in FDA Law Blog.