The price of convenience

Using extended-release versions of drugs — as opposed to taking a pill two or three times a day — costs Medicaid and Medicare billions.

In 2017, Medicare Part D spent $2.2 billion and Medicaid spent $952 million on extended-release versions of those drugs. The researchers estimate that swapping twice-daily versions for all extended-release formulations that year would have saved Medicare and Medicaid a total of $2.6 billion.

Two big caveats: 1) There are some short-acting drugs like metformin that can cause stomach upset, and 2) The study doesn’t consider the added cost for treating patients who miss dosages because of the scheduling.

Drug importation: One week left to comment to the FDA

The Partnership for Safe Medicines, which represents drug manufacturers, U.S. pharmacies, and healthcare organizations, wants your help to stop the FDA’s plan to allow drugs to be imported from Canada. It’s working with APhA, the National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations, and PhRMA, to help spread the word.

The FDA comment period ends in a week — on March 9. Now is the time to make your voice heard about imported medication.

The man cold: It’s cultural

How sick you say you are isn’t just about your illness — it might also be about your culture. So say University of Texas researchers.

Specifically, study participants who (1) earned less than the U.S. median household income, (2) claimed to be stoics with a high tolerance for pain or (3) had symptoms of depression were more likely to express being sick. In men with stronger family bonds, feeling sick was also more likely to be reported.

But it’s not just fodder for jokes. It can also impact whether someone is more willing to go to work sick, or to allow the illness to get much worse before seeking medical attention.

But the packaging is prettier

We all know that something labeled “artisanal” — food, coffee, daily newsletters — must be better. But in a shocking twist, researchers at Children’s National Hospital found that pharmaceutical-grade CBD works better than artisanal CBD for treating seizures.

Another small step toward cannabis oil in Georgia

The Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission has met again, this time in Austell.

The commission’s job is to award up to six licenses to grow marijuana and produce low-THC oil in the state. The major topic of the latest meeting: How to avoid lawsuits once those licenses are awarded.

Georgia’s 15,000+ medical cannabis oil patients are allowed to possess the low-THC oil, but there is no legal way for them to acquire it. A law signed last year by Governor Kemp established the commission to find a way to produce the oil in state.

Lego proteins

Why design proteins and other molecules in the lab when you can just do it on a computer? That’s what Dartmouth researchers wondered, so they created a new 3-D modeling technique for designing and testing new drug molecules.

What makes this different than other models is that, rather than try to work on the atomic level, the team found “a small number of structural patterns frequently recurred in proteins” — so they used those as their building blocks.

This basic discovery led the team to hypothesize that rather than modeling proteins as complex networks of interacting atoms, they can instead represent them much more simply as groupings of a limited set of structural building blocks.

Flu season begins to end

Georgia remains one of the states with high flu activity, but the number of reported cases has been going down.

CoviD-19 update

State and local health officials have been hamstrung in their ability to test widely for the coronavirus. Until very recently, the C.D.C. had insisted that only its test could be used, and only on patients who met specific criteria — those who had traveled to China within 14 days of developing symptoms or had contact with a known coronavirus case.