A good use for tetanus

Here’s a cool trick: Just about everyone is vaccinated against tetanus, so why not use that against cancer. Inject pancreatic cancer with some benign tetanus proteins* — it’s like putting a giant Kick Me sign on the tumor. In this case, “Kick Me” means “Attack me with your already-primed immune system.”

That’s just what immunologists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine did (with mice) … and it worked. “Following the treatment, both the original tumor and those that had metastasized shrank significantly, and the mice lived longer as a result.”

“Essentially, our new therapy makes immunologically ‘cold’ tumors hot enough for the immune system to attack and destroy them.”

* Using a modified listeria bacteria, which has a fondness for cancer cells.

Beware stroke with anti-nausea drugs

Well this isn’t good. ADAs for nausea (we’re talking domperidone, metoclopramide, and metopimazine) can increase a patient’s risk of stroke especially when first starting on the drug. That’s what French researchers found, although it shouldn’t be a surprise — ADAs are similar to antipsychotics, which have already been shown to do that.

It’s not a small risk, either:

After taking account of potentially influential factors, the researchers found that new users of ADA could be at a 3-fold increased risk of stroke shortly after treatment started.

They caution, though, that this is preliminary and observational, and while “the risk of ischaemic stroke appears to be associated with ADA use,” this study can’t establish cause. But be careful.

Fight insulin resistance with vitamin D

Cutting to the chase: There’s a “significant association” between lower vitamin D levels and insulin resistance. Based on data from almost 50,000 Americans, that’s the conclusion Chinese researchers came to. And it’s especially true for people with a BMI between 24 and 28 (i.e., the higher side of healthy).

This study suggests that keeping vitamin D3 levels as high as possible in the general US population can effectively reduce the incidence of insulin resistance.

Sweet is bad

Sugar is bad for you (and some even suggest it should be considered a poison). High fructose corn syrup is worse. Good thing the whole “artificial sweeteners cause cancer” thing turned out to be wrong, right?

Ha! Trick question. French researchers* now say, after examining the health records of more than 100,000 Frenchies over seven+ years, that “artificial sweeteners (especially aspartame and acesulfame-K) […] were associated with increased cancer risk.”

There had been some smaller studies, but this is (they say) the first one with “robust epidemiological evidence.”

So what’s left? Honey? (tasty, but not good for Diet Coke) Stevia? (blech) Xylitol? (your stomach may disagree) — or are we condemned to a bitter, bitter existence?

* At the Sorbonne — ooh la la

A better probiotic

Probiotics are good for your gut (and therefore good for you, period), but there’s one issue: Whether from supplements or yogurt, most of the microorganisms don’t survive the churning acid bath of your stomach.

So Singaporean engineers came up with a solution: a coating that survives the stomach and only dissolves when it encounters the phosphate ions in the small intestine, where it releases its bacterial payload.

Just like time-release medication, they’re hoping to see this perfected and adopted — and maybe even used for animals as an antibiotic alternative.

Today’s alcohol verdict

Once again we spin the Wheel of Scientific Studies™ — and this time we learn that moderate alcohol consumption is … bad for you. Specifically, it’s bad for your heart.

According to Mass General researchers, the reason some studies say otherwise is that people who drink moderately tend to have healthy lifestyles, which clouds the results. They’re smarter than that — they “leveraged […] new techniques and expansive genetic and phenotypic data from biobank populations.”

The risk curve, they say, is exponential. Going from 0 drinks to one a day has minimal risk, but there’s “much higher risk increases when progressing from seven to 14 drinks per week,” and when you get to 21 or more drinks per week you really need to keep your will updated.

Are Reddit users mentally ill?

Using what people online, AI can identify your mental disorder. So claim Dartmouth researchers who used conversations on Reddit* to do a bit of machine learning and see if they could spot emotional disorders — major depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder — just based on posts.

What’s new about this model is that it focuses on the emotion expressed, rather than just the topic. That’s because topic-based models might learn to associate “Covid” with anxiety, and thus incorrectly assume that every Covid researcher is suffering from depression or anxiety.

* Hopefully /r/funny and not, say, /r/watchpeopledie**
** Don’t bother, it’s been banned

The Long(ish) Read: Not Too Big edition

Drug Store News explains how — nestled between single indy pharmacies and big nationwide chains, “Patient-centric regional pharmacies play an important role in many small towns and communities throughout the United States.”