Booby prize

Breastfeeding a baby is so good…

How good is it?

It’s so good, you only have to do it for a little while to reduce the kid’s blood pressure throughout childhood: “Babies who were breastfed, even for a few days, had lower blood pressure at 3 years of age than children who had never been breastfed.”

Technicians — your day is coming!

Mark your calendars, pharmacy techs! The biggest gathering of Georgia’s pharmacy technicians in … well, since the Before Times is coming…

TechU 2021: September 25 in Savannah

3 hours of CPE! Dinner! Drinks! Fun! More info coming soon, so watch your inboxes!

A loopy way to study migraines

You think migraine, you think pain — but motion sickness is also part of the package, and one that’s not studied nearly as much. So a German physiotherapist is working to change that in a cool way. She’s getting migraine patients sick by putting them in (on?) a virtual reality roller coaster while she studies their dizzy brains via fMRI.

The functional MRI showed that patients with migraine had more activity in a few areas of the brain, including the cerebellum; the occipital lobe, which is the area that processes vision; and the pontine nuclei, which is a small area of the brainstem.

She hopes the data can be used to get a better understanding of what’s going on in migraine sufferers’ heads — “the evidence from this and past studies hints at some kind of reduction in the inhibitory processes that normally dampen down unpleasant sensations.”

No no, don’t bother getting up

Exercise, they say. It’ll make you feel better. But it turns out that the Jetsons were right: It’s actually better just to take a pill. Or, more scientifically, ‘antidepressant therapy was superior to physical exercise in the medium term, despite giving rise to a greater number of adverse effects.’

Despite the fact that adverse effects were significantly greater in the AT group, both interventions were found to be satisfactory by the participants and favorably affected their self-perceived health status.

Meanwhile, in Opposite Land

Philip Morris — yes, that Philip Morris — is buying the Vectura Group … a maker of asthma medicines. Why? Because smoking is on the way out, and other delivery systems are the way the company will have to deliver nicotine. (And also, the company says, so it can go “beyond nicotine” to possibly even treat respiratory and other diseases.)

Thus this “$1.2 billion deal that would add fresh expertise in devices, inhalation, regulation, and clinical manufacturing.”

Probably worth worrying about

The first cases of the totally-antifungal-resistant strain of Candida auris have been reported in the U.S. — in Washington, D.C., and in Texas.

What makes these newly reported cases more concerning is the fact none of the people had been treated with antifungal drugs prior to the diagnosis. That means the strain of C. auris they caught was already pan-resistant.

For coffee, six is enough

Aussie researchers have some rare bad news about coffee drinking: While enough coffee is good for you in lots of ways, too much seems to, well, shrink your brain. And maybe lead to dementia.

It was a big study, too, looking at data from almost 18,000 patients. The big takeaway: Those who drank more than six cups of coffee a day — that’s about three typical U.S. mugs — had a 53 percent increased risk of dementia.

“[I]f you’re finding that your coffee consumption is heading up toward more than six cups a day, it’s about time you rethink your next drink.”

Wash big or go home

Here’s one way to get out the message that you need to wash your hands: Send the world’s largest bottle of soap on a U.S. tour. Soapmaking company Soapbox is doing that with a 21-foot tall, 2,500-pound metal and fiberglass bottle that will tour the country, stopping at various pharmacies and food stores while “donating pallets of soap and personal hygiene kits to local charities at every stop along the way.”

In New York, you’re gonna need a bigger bottle