No more compounding vasopressin

Compounding: The FDA has won its court battle to keep vasopressin off the list of bulk drug substances for which there’s a clinical need. So you can’t bulk compound it — full-stop.

Automatic naloxone?

What if opioid users didn’t need to carry Narcan with them? What if they could wear a device that could detect an overdose and automatically deliver a dose of naloxone? It could happen. Purdue researchers are on it:

Lee’s team has built a wearable device designed to detect when a person’s respiration rate decreases to a certain level – converted from electrocardiography (EKG) signals – and then release naloxone, which blocks the opioid from binding to brain receptors.

And yes, in theory it could also deliver, say, epinephrine in the event of an allergic reaction.

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime

The time to get high for the first time, apparently.

American teens and adults may be more likely to try illegal or recreational drugs for the first time over the summer than at other times of year, a new study suggests.

Gosh, you really think so?

There’s little doubt that CBD oil can do good, but at some point maybe we need to scale back the list of miracles it can perform. From the BBC, “CBD oil: Have the benefits been overstated?”

Statin roulette

Getting statins after a heart attack to prevent a second one is good medicine. But whether that actually happens depends on where you live… and even your gender.

[Researchers] found that patients from New England were the most likely to receive a high-intensity statin (73%), while those from the West South Central U.S., which included states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, were the least likely (41%).

Patients in larger hospitals (with 500 or more beds) were also more likely than those in the smallest hospitals (with fewer than 100 beds) to get high-intensity statins: 59% versus 39%. Women were less likely than men to get high-intensity statins: 49% versus 56%.

Opioids: Recovery can be slow

Something to keep in mind: It takes longer to recover from opioid abuse than from alcohol abuse. In fact, say the authors of a paper in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, “[Opioid problem resolution] beyond recovery-year 1 may need enhanced support to address deficient self-esteem and promote well-being.”

Yet another smoking risk

Even if someone quits smoking, their leg arteries can be affected for decades, significantly increasing their risk for peripheral artery disease. In fact, “The study also showed that smoking increases the odds of developing PAD more than it raises the risk for heart disease and stroke.”

Good news from the dark side

People who eat dark chocolate are less likely to be depressed than those who eat its lesser-quality counterpart, milk chocolate. And we won’t even talk about white “it isn’t even chocolate” chocolate.

Individuals who reported eating any dark chocolate in two 24-hour periods had 70 per cent lower odds of reporting clinically relevant depressive symptoms than those who reported not eating chocolate at all. […] However researchers found no significant link between any non‐dark chocolate consumption and clinically relevant depressive symptoms.

Core values

Forget the peel. The real value — those beneficial bacteria — are in the apple’s core.

According to the study, which was published this month in the journal Frontiers of Microbiology, a single apple contains about 100 million bacterial cells — but if you toss out the core, you’re only consuming about 10 million of these precious cells.

The study also found that, while there may not be a nutritional difference between organic and conventional apples, “freshly harvested, organically managed apples harbor a significantly more diverse, more even and distinct microbiota, compared to conventional ones.”

On the other hand, if you prefer spicy food…

Eating too much (i.e., more than 50g per day) might be associated with a higher risk of dementia. (Oddly, higher consumption also correlates with lower age, lower income, and lower BMI. So go figure.) The above link was to the published paper. For the news story, click here.

The long read: clozapine

“Clozapine could save the lives of suicidal schizophrenic people who aren’t responding to other treatments. So why are so few doctors using it?“