Today’s Alzheimer’s breakthrough

One of the side effects of the anti-cancer drug Axitinib is that it inhibits the growth of blood vessels in the brain. That’s important for Alzheimer’s (Canadian researchers figured) because abnormal blood vessels can weaken the blood-brain barrier.

So they tested Axitinib on mice with signs of Alzheimer’s. And what d’ya know:

By using Axitinib for just one month, the researchers dramatically reduced blood vessel growth, restored the blood-brain barrier, and most significantly, helped mice perform better on cognitive tests.

That led the lead researcher to suggest that maybe targeting beta-amyloid or tau plaque in the brain is the wrong path to an Alzheimer’s cure. “[A] great deal of effort appears to have been directed toward the wrong targets for reversing Alzheimer’s disease.”

Student pharmacists — it’s Taco Thursday (plus beer)

You never need an excuse for beer and tacos, but we’ll give you one anyway: It’s the 2021 Policy on Tap — a fun-filled evening for student pharmacists to eat, drink, be merry, and (in between), hear about pharmacy legislation that will impact their careers. And then back to the beer and tacos.

It’s Thursday, October 7, 2021, at Tucker Brewing Company in, well, Tucker. Sample the brews, enjoy the tacos, and tell yourself it’s “studying.” (We’ll have guest speakers Representative David Knight and pharmacy attorney extraordinaire Greg Reybold there.)

Heck, you can even bring one guest — better still, grab some other student pharmacists from any pharmacy school (with permission, of course).

Click here for info and the Google Forms registration. Payment is by Venmo, instructions are on the page. Questions? Utoy Wong’s your guy: utoy.c.wongs@live.mercer.edu.

There’s a new Covid test in town

At-home Covid tests are hard to come by, you may have noticed, thanks to so many test-or-vaccinate mandates. The shortage could ease up, though, as the FDA has authorized a new OTC test: The ACON Laboratories Flowflex. It should double the available at-home tests within a couple of weeks.

Eeyore’s spirit magazine

Sure, Merck’s molnupiravir might be big news in the Covid fight — something to take the moment you’re diagnosed that can cut your risk in half.

It’s almost cause for celebration … except in the offices of the Atlantic, the world’s most depressing magazine. There they’ve found a downside.

For the pill to work, people will need to realize they’re sick and confirm that with a test; they will need to seek care from a health-care provider and successfully nab a prescription; they will need to access the drug and have the means to obtain it. Then they will need to take the drug successfully, which, according to Merck, means swallowing four capsules twice a day for five days—a total of 40 pills.

So yes, it won’t work unless people know they need it and take it correctly. Like every other medication.

Give blood

The Red Cross says we’re at the lowest level in six years. (Give in October and get a free sandwich from Zaxby’s.)

Find a donation center near you.

WHO: Let’s kick some malarial butt

The World Health Organization is rolling out the world’s first malaria vaccine, marking “a landmark moment in the fight against malaria.”

The vaccine is given in four doses, leading to fears that it wouldn’t be useful, or that people would skip doses. A pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi showed that was not the case; more than 800,000 children received the vaccine since the pilot began in 2019.

Get yer Medicare resources

Folks are starting to look at Medicare options for 2022. Be ready if they’ve got questions thanks to the good folks at NCPA:

“Do blood pressure medications increase the risk of psoriasis?”

We wouldn’t ask if the answer wasn’t “Yes,” or at least “Maybe.” According to a review from the British Pharmacological Society, it’s “Yes.”

This study confirmed the associations between antihypertensive drugs and psoriasis; ACE inhibitors, BBs, CCBs and thiazide diuretics increased the risk of psoriasis. Therefore, antihypertensive drug users should be carefully monitored for psoriasis.

Huntington’s starts at birth

Huntington’s disease doesn’t seem to be neurodegenerative after all. Embryologists at Rockefeller University have been able to “detect the earliest effects of Huntington’s in the first two weeks of human embryonic development.”

The findings recast Huntington’s, often considered a neurodegenerative condition, as a developmental disease, and point to new approaches for finding treatments for a disease that currently has no cure or therapies.

Or, as the lead researcher put it, “When the patient goes to the doctor, that’s when the last dominoes have fallen. But the first domino is pushed in the developmental phase.”

Magic in the music

Psilocybin can do wonders for depression. But psilocybin and music? That’s magic. Those shifty Danes, noting that people who take LSD often have an emotional reaction to music, decided to see how psilocybin affected patient’s feelings about music.

Turns out the psilocybin “increased the participants’ reported emotional response to the music by an average of 60 per cent.”

While that might make “Dark Side of the Moon” more fun, the real hope is that it might lead to better therapy.

“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use.”

The Long Read: Protecting the Supply Chain edition

“Generic drug safety: US regulators struggle to keep up with a global market”

While inspectors can, and do, turn up at US factories unannounced, it’s far trickier to perform surprise inspections at facilities located on the other side of the world, particularly amid a global pandemic – making it easier for rules to be flouted and improper practices to be covered up.