Bedtime for heart health

Well what d’ya know — there is a best bedtime: between 10:00 and 11:00pm.

As Brit researchers point out, there have been plenty of studies of sleep duration and cardiovascular disease, but not about sleep timing. So they decided to fix that. Studying more than 88,000 people, they found that “Going to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00 pm is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease compared to earlier or later bedtimes.”

They don’t know why that’s the case (“we cannot conclude causation”), but the numbers are pretty striking:

Compared to sleep onset from 10:00 to 10:59 pm, there was a 25% higher risk of cardiovascular disease with a sleep onset at midnight or later, a 12% greater risk for 11:00 to 11:59 pm, and a 24% raised risk for falling asleep before 10:00 pm.

Fun fact: Women can safely go to sleep before 10:00 — in that case, the danger is only significant for men.

The Israelis aren’t messing around

They’re holding a nationwide ‘war game’ to test preparedness for a future Covid wave — they call it the “Omega* Exercise.” (It imagines an omega variant of Covid-19, which frankly sounds pretty ominous.)

* Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, so after that they’ll need to start over with mythological characters. How does “Andromeda strain” sound?

It’s not just the FDA you need to worry about

Speaking of not messing around … with the 2020 COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act at their backs, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are going after companies large and small that make false (or unsubstantiated) claims about Covid-19 treatments. No word on whether one-time Jeopardy hosts/State Farm spokesmen are on their radar.

On or off — a new gene editing tool

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a powerful gene-editing tool: Tell it the gene you’re looking for, and it can search for and replace it using the Cas9 ‘scissors.’ Easy gene-swapping.

Now Canadian pharmacology researchers have given it a new and potentially huge trick: Instead of replacing a gene, they’re using the CRISPR to turn genes on and off without removing them.

Rather than cut out a sequence of A’s C’s G’s and T’s, they were able to add or remove “a minuscule chemical called a methyl group” to a gene to turn it on of off. It’s simpler and has less potential for unwanted consequences than wholesale replacement, and opens up all sorts of new therapy potential.

Next up: ‘What genes shall we turn on or off?’

(By the way, the best introduction to CRISPR I know of comes from RadioLab’s episode, “CRISPR.”)

The deserts are still there

Today’s “pharmacy deserts” story — about the loss of community pharmacies in rural areas — comes from the Washington Post: “The last drugstore: Rural America is losing its pharmacies.”

From 2003 to 2018, 1,231 of the nation’s 7,624 independent rural pharmacies closed, according to the University of Iowa’s Rural Policy Research Institute, leaving 630 communities with no independent or chain retail drugstore.

World’s smallest digestive system

For testing a drug, in vivo is better, but grad students aren’t always handy, and there’s a lot more paperwork. But now Harvard biological engineers researchers have a way to do in vivo testing … but do it in vitro. (You are permitted to say, “Huh?” at this point.)

Essentially, they created an “intestine chip” — a piece of plastic with “two parallel channels: one lined with human blood vessel cells, the other with human intestinal lining cells.” It lets them mimic what happens to a drug as its digested before going into the bloodstream. Best part:

The tissues in the chip are continuously stretched and released to recreate the rhythmic movements caused by muscle contractions in the gastrointestinal tract.

OK for J&J

The Oklahoma Supreme Court gave Johnson & Johnson a big win, throwing out an almost half-billion-dollar against the company for its role in the opioid crisis.

J&J had lost a 2017 lawsuit in Oklahoma, where a court ruled it had falsely marketed opioids in the state; it was ordered to by $572 million (later reduced to a mere $465 million) for violating the state’s ‘public nuisance’ law.

But now the Oklahoma State Supreme Court has overturned that ruling, saying that the public law was not meant to deal with major issues like this.

“The court allowed public nuisance claims to address discrete, localized problems, not policy problems. […] Oklahoma public nuisance law does not extend to the manufacturing, marketing and selling of prescription opioids.”

Captain Obvious takes the bus

“Head, neck injuries reported as leading cause of mortality in equestrian-related trauma”

The Long Read: Thinking of You edition

If anyone ever said that other people don’t think about you as much as you hope/fear they do — they were wrong.

Across eight experiments involving over 2,100 people, social psychologists Gus Cooney, Erica Boothby, and Mariana Lee [at UPenn’s Wharton School] found that we regularly underestimate the frequency with which others are thinking about us.

Good news:

“Not only are we in people’s thoughts more than we expect, but those thoughts are also likely to be more positive than we expect.”

 

---