You need to be one of the 100

The Georgia Pharmacy Foundation needs 100 of you. Step up.

The foundation does some great work, including funding scholarships for some of Georgia’s deserving student pharmacists. This March, the foundation needs 100 GPhA members to each donate $100 — it’s the $100 From 100 Campaign!

Be one of those 100 people.

And no, someone else won’t do it — you need to. Please, help tomorrow’s pharmacists. Give to the $100 From 100 Campaign!

Shrooms: Lots of hype, little data

Magic mushrooms — psilocybin to you and me — are the hot ticket these days for treating depression. But when you’re talking brain chemistry, you need to be careful what substances you’re mixing.

Problem: Oregon Health & Science University researchers found there have only been 40 studies of the effects of psilocybin going back to 1958 (!), not all were scientifically rigorous, and only one involved antidepressants.

“There’s a major incongruence between the public enthusiasm and exuberance with psychedelic substances for mental health issues — and what happens when they combine with the existing mental health treatments.”

Oh, and not only is there a risk of combining shrooms with meds, but the lack of info may force patients to choose between their existing meds and psilocybin — “That’s a very, very tough place to be.”

Carter-sponsored bill would ensure pharmacist reimbursement

Georgia’s own Buddy Carter was one of four members of the House — two Bloods and two Crips — who introduced HR 7213, the Equitable Community Access to Pharmacist Services Act (ECARPS) to …

… ensure patients continue to have access to essential pandemic and pandemic-related health services provided by pharmacists, including services to keep communities safe from COVID-19 and future public health threats.

What does that mean?

In short, it would mean that if physicians could be reimbursed under Medicare Part B for providing testing, initial treatment, or vaccination for “Covid–19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, or streptococcal pharyngitis,” well, then pharmacists can, too.

(Subject to limitations, state laws, and so on. You can wait till a legislative expert explains the details, or dive in and read the bill here — the good stuff starts on page 2, line 9.)

It was, of course, immediately praised by just about every pharmacy-related association and company you can name. Haven’t heard much from physicians, though.

* The others were representatives Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-Calif.), Ron Kind (D-Wis.), and David B. McKinley (R-W.Va.).

FDA looking to clean up the supply chain

And by “clean up” we mean it wants to set a federal standard for wholesale distribution and third-party logistics — one that would pre-empt any state laws or regs, even if the state has stricter rules.

It’s designed to affect wholesalers, but it’s got some (proposed) changes that could affect retail pharmacies. Mostly it’s about when a pharmacy crosses the line to being considered a wholesaler — you’d cross it if more than 5 percent of your sales were for office use rather than specific patients.

Oh, and if you’re shipping any meds to another pharmacy or a research institution that are not for a specific patient — yeah, no more of that, if the rule is finalized.

The deadline to provide comments on the proposed rule is June 6, 2022.

Antibiotics and women’s brains

Here’s an unexpected ripple effect: Women who take regular (i.e., chronic) antibiotics in middle age do so much damage to their gut biomes that it affects their cognitive abilities seven years later.

We’re not talking a huge effect — but a noticeable one. While Mass General researchers aren’t sounding any alarms, they do think their study “provide[s] a better understanding of potential complications of antibiotics throughout life, as well as generate hypotheses about the role of the gut microbiome in cognition.”

CBD: Percocet’s little helper

If you believe the hype (and the window posters), there’s little CBD can’t do. There isn’t a lot of actual evidence for its amazing powers, though. That’s changing bit by bit.

For example, a new study out of NYU found that a CBD tablet (Orcosa’s Oravexx) reduced the pain of people who had shoulder surgery “with no safety concerns,” fewer side effects, and — for better or worse — no psychotropic effects.

Test subjects were given Percocet, told “to wean off the narcotic as soon as possible,” and given either a placebo or the CBD to take for 14 days. Result: Those who took the CBD (with the Percocet) had an average of 23 percent less pain than those taking a placebo.

Print me a pill

Someday, probably not too long from now, you’ll* be able to print some medications on the spot, rather than stocking bottles of pills.

That kind of 3-D drug printing already exists in labs: The printer generates a pill layer by layer, using light to solidify it. It takes only a few minutes … per pill.

A new step to that Ctrl-P future: Spanish and British pharmacy researchers have designed a method to print a pill in just seconds by eliminating the layer-by-layer part and printing/solidifying the entire pill at once.

Eventually it will be out of the lab. Till then, if you have the GPhA Buzz Official Bingo Board, you can check off the “game changer” box.

* You being pharmacists and maybe physicians and veterinarians — hopefully not the local ne’er-do-wells.

Is grandma sleeping too much?

As you get older, you nap more (if for no other reason than because you can). Be careful, though: Too much napping can be a sign of Alzheimer’s.

After a 14 year study of older adults, psychiatry researchers at UC San Francisco found that the more people napped, the greater their chance of dementia.

Typical is napping an extra 11 minutes a year. But people who napped 25 extra minutes a year were likely to have mild cognitive impairment, and those whose average nap time went up more than an hour a year — well, they were much more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

Ultimately, we found that older adults who napped at least once or for more than an hour a day had a 40% higher chance of developing Alzheimer’s than those who did not nap daily or napped less than an hour a day. These findings were unchanged even after we controlled for factors like daily activities, illness and medications.

Not that naps caused Alzheimer’s; more likely the reverse: “[I]t does point to extended naps as a potential signal for accelerated aging.”

Captain Obvious knows basic math

“Covid-19 mixed with flu increases risk of severe illness and death”.

On the other hand, Lieutenant Surprise considers consumption

One way to reduce your risk of Covid-19 is to contract tuberculosis.

Microbiologists at an Ohio State University found …

… that Mtb [Mycobacterium tuberculosis] infected mice […] are resistant to secondary infection with CoV2 and its pathological consequences. [We] believe the inflammatory nature of Mtb infection creates a lung environment that is inhospitable to CoV2 propagation.

Teetotal risk

On Saturday we spun the Wheel of Scientific Studies™ and learned that even moderate alcohol use is bad for your heart.

Today we spin the wheel again and find that … ruh-ro: Never drinking alcohol can increase your chances of multiple sclerosis. Alcohol, you see, suppresses the immune system, while “MS is characterized by an overactive immune system.”

Swedish neuroscientists recognize that alcohol has, well, other issues:

Better understanding of the mechanisms behind our findings may help to define ways to achieve protection against MS by other means than alcohol consumption.

So yes, at the moment you can think of that drink as protection from MS, at least until something better comes along.