Bird flu, human patient

Sure, China might have beaten us to the punch with the first human case of bird flu this year, but we’re not far behind. Now the U.S. has its first case, out in Colorado. And ours is the much more patriotic H5N1 variant.

Don’t you worry, though — the guy is doing fine, and health officials say the chance of it affecting people is low. One in a million, really. What could possibly go wrong?

Take seven

Once you hit middle age, you only want about seven hours of sleep — no more, no less. So claim UK and Chinese scientists, who found that getting either too much or to little can keep you from performing at 100%.

[T]he team found that both insufficient and excessive sleep duration were associated with impaired cognitive performance, such as processing speed, visual attention, memory and problem-solving skills.

And getting those 420 minutes of sleep is also good for your mental health — any more or less and your anxiety and depression (and “overall wellbeing”) gets worse.

Who needs sriracha when you have migraines?

People who have migraines are more likely to suffer from burning mouth syndrome. Now you know.

Yes, there are even stock photo images. Who knew?

New weight-loss drug a-comin’

Weight-loss drug semaglutide was called a “game-changer.” But now Eli Lilly has ruined the metaphor with a drug it says will do even more. How much more? In a phase 3 trial, it cut patients’ weight by a whopping 20 percent.

Where semaglutide is a GLP-1 therapy, the new tirzepatide works on both GLP-1 and GIP receptors, “leading to greater decreases in food intake and greater increases in energy expenditure.” So if the game was changed before, now it’s … see, the metaphor breaks down.

Anyway, patients got a one weekly shot of tirzepatide (plus some diet and exercise):

At the end of the 72-week program those on the lowest dose had lost an average of 16 percent of their bodyweight, while those on the highest dose dropped 22.5 percent.

If you’re thinking that the diet and exercise was the real factor, get this: People doing diet and exercise but taking a placebo only lost an average of 2.4 percent of their weight.

Hot insulin news

Daily, schmaily

Those shifty Danes at Novo Nordisk have created an insulin injection that only needs to be taken once a week. Their insulin icodec just finished its first phase-3 trial, which “showed that it was as effective as daily dosing […] at controlling blood glucose*.”

Not trusting reporters to be able to handle basic math, “Novo Nordisk said that if approved for use, insulin icodec would reduce the number of basal insulin injections needed per year for type 2 diabetics from 365 to 52.”

Sniff this

What if you gave a spritz of insulin in the noses of people with and without type-2 diabetes? Could it help prevent cognitive decline?

Why yes, yes it can. Or so it seems, based on a study out of Boston, where neurology researchers looked at how long-term nasal insulin affects middle-aged and older folks. Turns out it does them some good:

[I]ntranasal insulin increased the walking speed, increased cerebral blood flow and decreased plasma insulin in participants with type 2 diabetes, while it improved decision making and verbal memory in trial participants without the disease and those with pre-diabetes.

Behave yourself … or die

That’s exactly what happened: Human behavior caused higher excess death rates in the South during the pandemic. The math was fairly straightforward — Georgetown researchers looked at historical death rates across the country, then compared them to deaths from January 3, 2020, to September 26, 2021.

The southern part of the United States has had higher mortality rates than the rest of the U.S. since the start of summer in 2020. Since October 2020, 48% of Covid-19 deaths were in the South, which makes up 38% of the population, pointing to disproportionate outcomes regionally.

It’s worth noting that this study didn’t look at how many people died from Covid-19, but rather how many excess deaths there were, period, which they consider more reliable.

The Long Read:

If you haven’t heard the story of Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught — get familiar. It’s rather terrifying. Using procedures all too common in hospitals, she mistakenly took the wrong drug out of the automatic dispenser, giving a patient vecuronium instead of Versed. The patient died, and she, to the shock of many, was convicted of negligent homicide.

“For example, [if you type] M-E-T. Is that metronidazole? Or metformin? One is an antibiotic. The other is a drug for diabetes. That’s a pretty big mix-up. But when you see M-E-T on the screen, it’s easy to select the wrong drug.”

And Vaught may not be the last, as Kaiser Health News explains.