You just can’t win

It’s possible that women with too low an LDL cholesterol level could be at higher risk for stroke.

After tracking nearly 28,000 women aged 45 and up for two decades, investigators determined that women with LDL levels of 70 mg/dL or lower were more than twice as likely to experience a bleeding (“hemorrhagic”) stroke than those with LDL levels in the range of 100 to 130 mg/dL.

Tobacco stays, e-cigs out, and CBD in at Rite-Aid

The company will stop selling cigarettes and e-cigs in all its locations (but will continue to sell regular cigarettes), and will begin offering CBD-based products in it’s Oregon and Washington State stores.

Kratom: Danger or hype?

A new report from the CDC is making headlines that kratom is responsible for a lot of deaths. But it’s really not that simple.

“Herbal drug kratom linked to almost 100 overdose deaths” reads USA Today’s headline (leaving out the time period — it’s 91 deaths over 18 months.) But the key word is linked.

Over the 18 months (per that CDC report)…

  • 27,338 people died of overdoses.
  • 152 of them tested positive for kratom.
  • In 91 of those cases the ME/coroner blamed kratom as a cause of death (not necessarily the cause of death). And the CDC notes that “Postmortem toxicology testing protocols were not documented and varied among and within states.”
  • In only 7 of those cases was kratom definitively the cause of death.

So draw your own conclusions: Dangerous drug gaining popularity? Hyperbolic headlines over a minor issue? Somewhere in between?

FDA: Opioid cold turkey is a bad idea

In case Captain Obvious isn’t around to remind you, the FDA has put out a statement pointing out that “sudden discontinuation of opioid pain medicines” can lead to serious withdrawal symptoms.

A new class of osteoporosis drug appears

A new osteoporosis drug has a new effect: romosozumab (its friends call it “Evenity”) is able to restore lost bone — something other treatments can’t do. The FDA has just approved it.

Patients taking the drug saw increases in bone density in their spines on the order of 15 percent — a huge figure, similar to the amount of bone made in early adolescence.