Skin in the game (literally)

Americans, especially younger ones, seem to need a refresher about the sun. A survey from the American Academy of Dermatology found that a heck of a lot of folks think things like ‘tanning is good for you,’ and ‘reflected sunlight won’t burn.’

Reality: Tanning looks great, but it’s just your body desperately trying to protect itself from DNA damage from UV light. Tell your customers and patients: Use sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen. And if you really want to be a bit darker, well, there are some great self-tanners here in aisle 3.

Covid is somehow causing diabetes

Is it lack of exercise during lockdowns? The virus attacking the pancreas? Something we haven’t figured yet? A side effect of Covid-19 seems not only to be making diabetes worse, but actually triggering it in people — including children with mild cases.

In fact, VA epidemiologists found that “Covid survivors were about 39% more likely to have a new diabetes diagnosis in the six months after infection than non-infected users.”

And a British study of almost 50,000 hospitalized Covid patients “found that they were 50% more likely to have diabetes some 20 weeks after discharge than matched controls.” No answers, but possibilities include…

…that the pancreas’s insulin-excreting beta cells are destroyed either by the virus or by the body’s response to the infection.

Other explanations may include an acute stress response to the infection, the use of steroid treatments that help survival but increase blood-sugar, or just the unmasking of diabetes cases that had previously escaped diagnosis.

Pop! goes the pathogen

Colistin kills germs — it’s often the antibiotic of last resort against superbugs. Fun fact: No one knew how it worked. [insert dramatic music here] Until now.

British researchers have figured it out. Colistin, it seems, “punches holes in bacteria, causing them to pop like balloons.”

This is good to know. Learning how colistin punches through both a bacteria’s membranes led them to figure a way to make it work even better by making that process easier using a new, experimental drug called murepavadin.

Clinical trials “are due to begin shortly.”

A salt tradeoff

A new study out of Germany found that salt has a pair of interesting effects on the immune system. When exposed to high sodium concentrations, immune cells, it seems, take in less oxygen and their mitochondria produce less ATP.

The result, though, was only half bad. Those immune cells — patrolling monocytes — “were able to fight off infections more effectively,” after sodium exposure, but at the same time, “this could also promote inflammation, which might increase cardiovascular risk.”

The effect is quick, too:

The findings showed that the dampening effect on mitochondria doesn’t just occur after an extended period of increased salt intake – it also happens after a single pizza.

So is salt bad for your body? As is so often the case, it depends.

The kids are all right

The latest answer to the question “Is technology bad for kids?” seems to be “No.”

Sure, adolescents are using a lot more technology over the past 30 years, but British researchers looked at records of more than 430,000 U.K. and U.S. adolescents and whether social media, television, and digital devices in general caused emotional problems.

In fact, other than a slight uptick in emotional problems because of social media, “The study found no consistent changes in technology engagement’s associations with conduct problems or suicidality.”

Then again, people have been worried about technology like this for a long time:

The constant diffusion of statements in snippets, the constant excitements of feeling unjustified by fact, the constant formation of hasty or erroneous opinions, must in the end, one would think, deteriorate the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeals. (The Spectator, November 9, 1889)

Less ecstatic

Yesterday we told you how Ecstasy — aka MDMA — seems to be a major step forward in the treatment of PTSD. But there’s always nuance, and a Wayne State University psychiatrist warns against thinking of Ecstasy as some sort of instant cure.

Throughout the history of psychiatry, people have become too excited about promising cures like psychoanalysis, ketamine, cannabinoids, virtual reality, propranolol, opioids and memory-enhancing agents for treatment of PTSD and other psychiatric disorders. Although each of these treatments helped some patients, none was a magic bullet.

Is it viral or bacterial?

When someone’s got a respiratory issue, if it’s bacterial they’ll get an antibiotic, but if it’s viral … well, they’ll probably also get an an antibiotic*, but it won’t do anything.

Still, knowing what kind of infection at work is important, and now Duke researchers think they have a tool to do just that. It can “accurately distinguish between a viral and a bacterial infection for respiratory illness” in less than an hour.

How, you ask? By looking at the body’s gene expression, of course.

The immune system activates one set of genes when fighting bacterial infections and a different set of genes in response to a viral infection.

Even better, it’s not just in the lab — it was tested in the real world.

* Because they’ll beg their prescriber for one

The fat protein

The headline almost had us signalling for Captain Obvious: “Your stomach may be the secret to fighting obesity”. In fact, it’s not the stomach — it’s a protein in the stomach called gastrokine-1 (GKN1). It seems that GKN1 messes with gut bacteria in such a way that the body accumulates fat. Block GKN1 and, well…

Models without GKN1 weighed less and had lower levels of total body fat and higher percentages of lean mass — despite consuming the same amount of food. When put on a high-fat diet, models without GKN1 showed a resistance to weight gain, increased body fat and hepatic inflammation.

Next up will be finding a viable way to block production of the protein, and maybe have a new way to fight obesity.

Non-pharma story that raised our eyebrows

“Decapitated worms ‘see’ with their headless bodies,” which includes the rather unsurprising phrase, “Removing an animal’s head might seem like an odd way to conduct behavior experiments.”