Post prophylactic prophylactic

It’s kind of like “Plan B1” — taking doxycycline after unprotected sex can significantly reduce the risk of contracting gonorrhea, chlamydia, or syphilis. This comes from a clinical trial “in which people [took] 200 milligrams of the antibiotic doxycycline within three days of having sex without a condom.”

The results were so good that the trial was halted. It was a preliminary trial, but with doxy being so common and well-tolerated, you can expect to see references to DoxyPEP appearing soon enough.

Our number-two story

It’s the kind of thing a giggly 12-year-old might think of, but it works: A swallowable, vibrating capsule can treat constipation.

And yes, it does exactly what you (and the 12-year-old) would expect:

The swallowable pill acts by vibrating during passage through the gut, where it is thought to augment colonic biorhythm and peristalsis.

Each capsule is activated for a pair of two-hour “stimulation cycles” — 3 seconds of vibration followed by 16 seconds rest. And the icing on the cake: It comes from Georgia — specifically, the Medical College of, in Augusta.

Money quote: “The capsules also improved straining score, stool consistency, and [most importantly] quality of life.”

Obesity, fertility, and diabetes medication

If you have obese mice you want to get pregnant, Aussie researchers have good news: Dapagliflozin (the diabetes med) “altered reproductive hormones in obese mice” increasing their chanced of getting pregnant.

“After eight weeks of treatment, blood glucose levels in the mice normalised, body weight reduced, reproductive cycles recovered, and reproductive hormones and ovulation were largely restored, compared with mice that were not treated.”

Next step: focusing on the exact mechanism that causes dapagliflozin to affect reproduction.

Tilting at Canadian windmills

The FDA has released its final guidance for industry on importing drugs from Canada for “small entities.” It explains how you (assuming you’re small) can submit an importation program proposal to the agency.

The Trump administration supported this. The Biden administration supported this. Congress supports this. Well, I guess that’s just about everyone!

Whoops … one small exception: Canada. Distributors there have made it clear they aren’t interested in selling for distribution here in the Great Brown South (and the Canadian government isn’t on board, either). But it makes for good sound bites.

Prostate med warning

There seems to be an issue with prostate cancer meds causing heart issues. Specifically, abiraterone and enzalutamide.

Researchers at Michigan Medicine found that, patients who had also undergone hormone therapy “had 1.77 times the risk of being admitted to the emergency room or the hospital due to diabetes, hypertension or heart disease” if they took abiraterone. For enzalutamide it was 1.22 times the risk.

But didn’t these drugs have clinical trials? Yep, but the trial participants were a lot younger than the real-world patients. Oops?

Good news about vaping!

People using electronic cigarettes generated $15 billion in revenue for the healthcare industry in 2018.

That’s based on ‘excess utilization’ of healthcare services above that of non-vapers, according to a study out of UC San Francisco. That money — whether from public insurance, private coverage, or out of pocket — paid for “overnight hospital stays, emergency department (ED) visits, and doctor and home visits.”

(And later this year, hurricanes will generate lots of revenue for the building and contractor industries. Yay!)

Triggered by a scent

Can smell start a brain tumor? Possibly so. Gliomas, Chinese neurologists found, can be set in motion by “neuronal activity in the olfactory circuit,” according a paper in Nature.

It actually makes sense, as they found that “glioma originated mainly from the olfactory bulb.” When scent-receptor neurons get excited, they release insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), and that …

“… is equivalent to the growth signals from the radio wave transmitter tower. Just as an electric wave is received by an antenna, this signal is received by the IGF1 receptor and transmitted to tumor cells, thereby initiating cell malignancy and proliferation.”

But no, it’s not as if specific scents trigger it — all they’ve found is that gliomagenesis starts in the nose. More research, as always, is needed.

Quick bits

Dupixent for EOE

The FDA has approved Sanofi’s monoclonal antibody Dupixent for eosinophilic esophagitis — the first drug ever to treat EOE successfully. (About 60% of patients taking Dupixent saw an improvement.) Dupixent had already been approved to treat atopic dermatitis.

Opening a door to more meds

University of Utah medicinal chemists have taken a major step toward synthesizing eleutherobin, a potential cancer-fighting compound, by decoding the DNA of soft sea corals.

The advance opens the possibility of producing the compound in the large amounts needed for rigorous testing and could one day result in a new tool to fight cancer.

Until now, it’s been impossible to get enough of these kinds of compounds to run any trials. Even better, the methods they used can be transferred to other species that produce potential drugs.

Today’s non-pharma health story: Dancing for COPD

COPD is a huge problem worldwide, but people in some Third World and less-developed countries (and the U.S.) can’t always afford their medications. Folks in Kyrgyzstan have a solution: pulmonary rehabilitation. In this case, dancing the Kara Jorgo, the country’s national dance. (There’s a bit more, but that’s the fun part.)

“I remember one woman who was 63. She cried because she had severe shortness of breath, coughed all the time, was dependent on oxygen, and took a lot of strong antibiotics and inhalers. She was really depressed. Afterwards, she was like a flower — she smiled and her body language was more active.”