Covid breakthrough oddity

People with mental health issues are more likely to have a breakthrough Covid-19 infection. Weird, right? Breakthroughs seemed like bad luck — if there was something underlying them, we didn’t know what it was.

But now researchers at UC San Francisco and the San Fran VA system found that “psychiatric disorder diagnoses were associated with an increased incidence of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infection.” (They studied more than 263,000 fully vaccinated patients, in fact.)

Why? They don’t know*. But it does suggest that it’s worth targeting prevention efforts at those with mental health issues.

* Could be a suppressed immune system, could be “engag[ing] in more risky behaviors.”

Dance dance dance the night away

One thing you can count on at the Georgia Pharmacy Convention: A-bleepin’-mazing music at the President’s Bash! This year you’ll be blown away by Blues Factor!

Check ’em out right here, then make sure you’re registered, booked, and have your dancing shoes polished!

The 2022 Georgia Pharmacy Convention
June 9-12, 2022 Room block closes on May 18. Click here to register today!

Tots are getting hepatitis

Since the end of March, young children in the U.K., Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and now the U.S. (Alabama, to be specific) have suddenly contracted hepatitis — and scientists aren’t sure why.

Two of the kids in the U.S. have required liver transplants; so have at least seven in Europe.

The suspected culprit: an adenovirus. Doctors ruled out toxic exposure, and the kids didn’t have a hepatitis virus. Some of the kids tested positive for Covid-19, but not all. At least half, though, tested positive for an adenovirus.

“The leading hypotheses center around adenovirus — either a new variant with a distinct clinical syndrome or a routinely circulating variant that is more severely impacting younger children who are immunologically naïve.”

Rite Aid plans small

While other chains start from a pharmacy and expand into full-fledged everything stores and/or health centers, Rite Aid says it’s going the other way.

Despite the fact that it just closed 145 stores, the company plans to open new “small-format stores with a focus on pharmacy, strategically located in markets where access to pharmacy is limited.”

It didn’t say when (other than “later this year”) or which specific underserved areas it was targeting.

Hot training coming fast

The next session of APhA’s Pharmacy-Based Immunization Delivery: A Certificate Program for Pharmacists is coming fast: Sunday, May 22. It’s from 8:00 am – 5:00 pm at GPhA’s World Headquarters in Sandy Springs, and that’s part of the full 20 hours (!) of CE the course provides.

So drop what you’re doing and get to GPhA.org/immunization for the details — register now!

Saving you a click

Does watermelon improve your physical performance?

Per researchers from a several universities — including Georgia’s Kennesaw State — no, no it doesn’t.

Short-term watermelon supplementation does not appear to enhance isometric force production, bench press performance, blood vessel diameter, or muscle oxygenation parameters.

Cannabis up, prescriptions down

The newest tidbit of data on marijuana legalization is an interesting one: States where recreational pot is legal show significantly lower demand for prescriptions for “pain, depression, anxiety, sleep, psychosis, and seizures.”

It was actually a fairly straightforward study for Cornell and Indiana university researchers to do: They looked at Medicaid prescription data from all 50 states from 2011 to 2019, and they compared that to pot’s legal status (which obviously changed in some states, making it even easier).

That’s good news for the people paying the Medicaid bills, sure, although the authors caution “that cannabis use is not itself without harm.”

Things that make you go “Hmmm”

Since 2020, Brazil’s military has purchased more than 35,000 Viagra pills.

Brazil’s Navy and Army justified the purchases by saying that the medication can be used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.

Secondhand smoke, firsthand arthritis

Non-smokers who inhaled secondhand smoke, especially as children, are more likely to eventually suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, get this: Their risk is increased by as much as that of active smokers’.

That’s the conclusion of French researchers who examined the health records of more than 79,000 women over the last 32 years. (They believe it’s connected with the fact that rheumatoid arthritis is apparently triggered via mucus membranes.)

The fact that exposure to smoking at the very beginning of life could be associated with RA suggests that autoimmunity could be triggered even earlier and many years before the onset of the symptoms.

Fighting tumors with sound and fury

Like loitering teens driven off by playing polka music, liver tumors can be attacked with sound. And (to continue the metaphor) even if it doesn’t kill them, they don’t come back.

University of Michigan biomedical engineers found that they could destroy liver tumors in rats using pulses of very, very focused ultrasound. Those pulses create bubbles in the tumor that eventually wreck it.

Well, a lot of it. The cool part of the treatment (called histotripsy) is that they don’t have to destroy the entire tumor. The treatment itself stimulated the rats’ immune system to attack what was left — as if that polka music attracted Oktoberfest revelers to clear our any remaining loiterers.

By destroying only 50% to 75% of liver tumor volume, the rats’ immune systems were able to clear away the rest, with no evidence of recurrence or metastases in more than 80% of animals.