Delta is in Georgia

The delta variant of Covid-19, that is — aka B.1.617.2 or “the one discovered in India” — has appeared in Georgia, according to DPH.

“It’s more contagious, probably about 40-50% more likely to spread from one person to the next,” Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins said. “It particularly can affect younger people. And it looks like it also may be more dangerous when it comes to the severity of the disease.”

(That last part is still unconfirmed.)

Why “squeaky clean” is bad for you

And everything else you wanted to know about showering — from a dermatology perspective.

A pharmaceutical’s a pharmaceutical, no matter how small

File under “Nifty”: MIT engineers have found a way to pack the same drugs into tinier packages. For hydrophobic drugs, at least, forget milling with methylcellulose. Instead, they create an emulsion, then crystallize it.

Using their nanoemulsion technique, the researchers were able to achieve drug loading of about 60 percent. In contrast, the currently available formulations of fenofibrate have a drug concentration of about 25 percent. The technique could be easily adapted to load even higher concentrations by increasing the ratio of oil to water in the emulsion.

And we swear this is from the press release, not a 1960s Star Trek script:

“The particle formation is nearly instantaneous, so everything that was in your liquid drop gets converted to a solid particle without any loss. After drying, we have nanocrystals of fenofibrate uniformly distributed in the methylcellulose matrix.”

How I met your mother at the soda bar

Contrary to what you might believe from the dating scene, drinking alcohol actually reduces your chance of getting pregnant. Heavy drinking will cut your chances all the time, but during the second half of the menstrual cycle even moderate consumption will affect it.

“At the time of ovulation, usually around day 14 of the cycle, consuming a lot of alcohol — either heavy or binge drinking — was significantly associated with reduced chances of conception.”

Happier and cancer-free

So you’ve got some mice. They’re depressed, possibly because they have cancer. Good news: A UCLA research team found that MAOIs might encourage the immune system to fight cancer.

Looking for ways the immune systems in sick and healthy animals compare, they examined the “immune cells from the mice’s melanoma tumors — immune cells that weren’t really working. And that’s where they found the MAOI connection:

Immune cells that had infiltrated tumors had much higher activity of a gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA. MAOA’s corresponding protein, called MAO-A, controls levels of serotonin and is targeted by MAOI drugs.

You can see where this is going. It’s not a therapy yet, but it is a new avenue for research.

“What’s especially exciting is that this is a very well-studied and safe class of drug, so repurposing it for cancer isn’t as challenging as developing a completely new drug would be.”

Impatience news

The “C” in CGM

Sure, it’s called “continuous glucose monitoring,” but it can be intermittent. If you want the best for your diabetic patients, though, a Belgian study found that they should switch to legit CGM: “Adults with type 1 diabetes who switched from intermittently scanned to real-time continuous glucose monitoring saw improved time in range and quality of life.”

Granted it wasn’t a gigantic difference, but it’s 2021 and even those small changes (59.6% time in range vs. 51.9%) can add up over time.

Is it working?

Singaporean biomedical engineers have developed a blood test that can tell if target cancer therapy is working … in only 24 hours. (Note that this is for targeted therapy, not general chemotherapy.)

This method requires only a tiny amount of blood sample for the analysis and each test takes less than one hour to complete. So, it is less invasive and yet more informative. In this way, doctors could monitor a patient’s response to treatment more regularly during the course of the treatment, and make timely adjustments to customise the treatment for better outcomes.”

And why yes, it does use nanoparticles: millions of gold nanorings that capture the extracellular vesicles secreted by cancer cells.

We called ’em “Whip-Its”

Want quick treatment for depression that resists treatment, and aren’t willing to mess with psychedelics? Not only did University of Chicago and Washington University researchers find that nitrous oxide can help, you don’t even need that much.

[A] single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects.

And get this: Those few huffs can last, in some cases, for up to two weeks.

Not tonight, dear, I took my meds

What types of meds are most likely to cause headaches? Apparently (according to Rutgers researchers), no one has bothered to actually look … but they were up to the task.

They examined 2,673,081 records in the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, found 86,086 with “headache” listed, and did some magic to determine which meds were most likely culprits.

The answer seems to be … all of them:

According to the researchers, the most common entries included some nitrates, contraceptives, antihistamines, anxiolytics/sedatives, antifungals/antibiotics, antineoplastics, pulmonary hypertension directed vasodilators, immunosuppressants, and antidiabetic medications.