Get ready to do this every year

The idea of annual Covid shots is going from “Who knows?” to “Probably gonna.” The latest evidence comes from a letter by three FDA bigwigs — Peter Marks, Janet Woodcock, and Robert Califf — in JAMA.

They suggest that, starting as soon as this fall, we may need to plan on annual Covid vaccinations. And like the flu shot, each year’s Covid vaccine would be based on the (sub)variants in circulation.

Administering additional COVID-19 vaccine doses to appropriate individuals this fall around the time of the usual influenza vaccine campaign has the potential to protect susceptible individuals against hospitalization and death, and therefore will be a topic for FDA consideration.

The key word, of course, being “consideration.”

That’s a good time to remind you…

That you’ll want your immunization skills to be at their very best.

No one wants the person with the needle to be “good enough,” so show you’re better — show them the awesome certificate you get for completing APhA’s Pharmacy-Based Immunization Delivery certificate training program. (And you can enjoy the 20 hours of CE you get for completing it.)

It’s coming up in just a few weeks: Sunday, May 22, 2022 from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at GPhA’s World Headquarters in Sandy Springs.

Get the details and sign up today at GPhA.org/immunization!

Faster, better opioid delivery

Drugs delivered through the spinal cord, like morphine, can take a while to affect the brain. Meanwhile, some drugs used in emergencies (like dexmedetomidine) work faster because they activate the glymphatic system.

Finnish researchers have found a way to have that cake and eat it too — to take advantage of the glymphatic system when delivering morphine. The solution (literally) is saline: A strong saline solution “accelerate[s] the glymphatic influx of cerebrospinal fluid at the brain level,” so the Finns combined that with opioids. Result:

[B]y combining the two methods used in fairly different patient groups you can almost quadruple the morphine concentration in the spinal cord and enhance pain relief.”

Depressed women are … crying for help?

Why do women get depression more than men? Because they’re weak, that’s why. No, seriously — that’s what U.S. and Finnish researchers concluded after investigating the correlation between low grip strength and higher odds of depression.

Depression typically occurs during social conflicts, such as physical or sexual abuse. Physically strong individuals can often single-handedly resolve conflicts in their favor, whereas physically weaker individuals often need help from others. We argue that depression is a credible cry for help. Because men generally have greater strength than women, we argue that men may be more likely to resolve conflicts using physical formidability and women to signal others for help.

(On a personal note, I think that conclusion falls somewhere between poppycock and balderdash, but what do I know?)

Hanker for a hunka cheese

Help kids find cheeses. A preliminary study out of Ontario’s University of Guelph found that kids who ate more cheese had lower LDL cholesterol.

Interesting twist: The researchers were looking at dairy in general (including milk and yogurt), but only cheeses made a difference. ‘Further research is warranted.’

And before you ask: No, this study was not sponsored by Big Cheese (Gros Fromage Canadien). We checked.

An FDA warning to learn from

If you just read the news story, this seems like a typical FDA warning letter — in this case to Miami University of Ohio for “falsifying data.”

But if you read the actual letter, you get a much fuller picture of why MU was scolded for its heparin testing: Test results in an ‘uncontrolled’ folder (i.e., not password-protected). No software audit trail. And our favorite, “All users shared one master login.”

Pro tip: While the biggest problem here seems to be a lazy user who didn’t feel like re-running an analysis — the various issues FDA highlights are worth noting because they’re easy traps to fall into: “Oh, just use my login….”

Bad mask, good result

Here’s an unexpected benefit to wearing a less-than-perfect face mask: variolation. Well, maybe.

Like getting a bit of smallpox from an 18th century time traveller, people today may have “an incidental but potentially beneficial form of immunization achieved by inhaling smaller doses of the virus than would be inhaled without a mask.”

At least that’s the mathematical model Canadian researchers came up with. But it makes sense, and it reinforces the idea that a so-so mask is better than no mask at all.

How risky is psilocybin?

Excellent question! It hasn’t been answered yet, so British and Aussie researchers decided to change that. What kind of (bad) reactions did people taking magic mushrooms have? they asked.

In a nutshell, here’s what they found:

• Only 0.2% of magic mushroom users said they needed emergency medical treatment (EMT).
• Of those who did, most were younger or first-time users.
• “The most commonly cited symptoms by EMT seekers were psychological,” including panic, paranoia, and seeing/hearing things.
• BUT 37% (of that 0.2%) said they passed out.
• And a big caveat: “The majority of EMT seekers said they had consumed other substances within the same session as the magic mushrooms” including marijuana and alcohol. Hmm.

Of the 9,233 people surveyed, eight required hospitalization, and all but one said they had returned to normal within 24 hours.

“No drug is entirely risk free, but relative to most recreationally used drugs, psilocybin mushrooms demonstrate a good safety profile based on the rate of emergency medical treatment seeking in this sample.”

And then there’s this

Gassing up

Researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School are answering the important questions, like What kind of diet gives you the really bad gut gas?

The answer: Eating meat. A plant-based diet — more fiber, less protein — “resulted in a lower hydrogen sulfide production compared to an animal-based (i.e., Western) diet.”