It doesn’t matter when you take BP meds

“Nothing, not a smidge” — that’s how much difference Scottish researchers found there was for people taking their antihypertensives in the morning vs. the evening.

“Patients can take their BP medication in either the morning or evening, as the timing makes no difference to cardiovascular outcomes. This is the result and I think it’s definitive.”

Did you renew?

If you haven’t renewed your GPhA membership yet, it ends today. That’s it — starting tomorrow, you’ll be a former member! Don’t let that happen!

You’ll not only lose out on member benefits, but more importantly, you’ll be hurting the profession and Georgia patients who count on GPhA to fight for them.

If you haven’t renewed yet, get yourself over to GPhA.org/renew and do it right now!

A small dose to live forever

Rapamycin — officially for cancer therapy and after organ transplantations, but also known to increase lifespan … if taken for life. The problem is the side effects; they’re tolerable if the alternative is organ rejection and death, but not so much if you’re just taking it to live longer.

But German biologists just learned something new: At least in animals, “brief exposure to rapamycin has the same positive effects as lifelong treatment.” The trick is that the brief exposure needs to happen as early as possible. Giving it to young adult mice for just a few months, for example, protected them through middle-age.

Next up: Seeing if there’s a way to get those effects when administered later — those Boomers aren’t getting any younger.

Migraines: Size matters

Papa Bear was too fat. He got migraines.

Mama Bear was too skinny. She got migraines.

Baby Bear’s BMI was jusssst right, so Baby had a lower risk for migraine, but spent a lot of time contemplating the “nature vs. nurture” debate.

[R]esearchers found that compared with those with normal BMI, participants who were either underweight or had obesity had an increased risk for migraine.

The end (sort of) of free Covid tests

This coming Friday will be the last time you can order free at-home Covid-19 tests from Covidtests.gov. As Congress has cut further funding for combatting Covid-19, HHS has decided to save the remaining stockpile of tests for an expected fall surge.

“If Congress provides funding, we will expeditiously resume distribution of free tests through covid.gov. Until then, we believe reserving the remaining tests for distribution later this year is the best course.”

 

Another diabetes clue

Eating too much sugar can lead to diabetes, but the reasons for that aren’t entirely clear. A new discovery, though, points its sweet finger at what’s becoming a common culprit: the gut biome.

Columbia University microbiologists found that too much sugar killed off segmented filamentous bacteria in the gut. That kind of bacteria happens to help produce Th17 immune cells. And Th17 immune cells “are necessary to prevent metabolic disease, diabetes, and weight gain.”

“These immune cells produce molecules that slow down the absorption of ‘bad’ lipids from the intestines and they decrease intestinal inflammation. In other words, they keep the gut healthy and protect the body from absorbing pathogenic lipids.”

Does that mean that pre- or probiotics with filamentous bacteria might save the Th17 and stave off diabetes? Perhaps, but you know the mantra: More research is needed.

Alcohol, not even once?

Once again, an answer to the never-ending question: How much alcohol is safe to drink? And today’s answer is …

Maybe none? A German research team has found that “Even a single dose of drinking alcohol — ethanol — can permanently alter synapses and mitochondrial movement in the brain’s neurons.” And that, they say “suggest[s] that even a single consumption event can lay the foundation for alcohol addiction.”

That might be fearmongering, but to be fair, they found that can happen in fruit flies and mice, so why not humans?

“These mechanisms may even be relevant to the observation in humans that the first alcohol intoxication at an early age is a critical risk factor for later alcohol intoxication and the development of alcohol addiction.”

Another Parkinson’s clue

There is, apparently, a single protein complex that controls a whole line of metaphorical dominos in humans. If that protein — called PRC2 — doesn’t work correctly, genes stop doing their jobs correctly, eventually leading to the body not producing dopamine and serotonin. And that, say Swedish researchers, leads to the kinds of symptoms typical of Parkinson’s.

The big takeaway is that, even if someone’s genes are okay, a problem with a protein that regulates those genes could lead to effects just as bad. The good news, though is that this finding “could open up interesting new possibilities for diagnosis and treatment.”

Wild medical science

Zapping the cravings

This might be overkill, but if someone suffers from loss-of-control binge-eating disorder, Penn researchers say that wiring a device into their brains can stop the cravings.

They found that, just before a binge-crave begins, the brain’s nucleus accumbens starts getting active in a specific way. By using a device approved for treating epilepsy — “surgically placed beneath the scalp, with wires running through the skull to the nucleus accumbens in each hemisphere of the brain” — they were able to interrupt that activity with a bit of high-frequency electrical stimulation.

[T]he patients reported sharp reductions in their feelings of loss-of-control, and in the frequencies of their bingeing episodes—each also lost more than 11 pounds. […] There appeared to be no significant adverse side-effects.

One liver good, many livers better!

If someone has end-stage liver disease, there might be an alternative before jumping to a transplant: “growing tiny new livers elsewhere in the patient’s bodies.”

A company called LyGenesis is beginning human trials of a technique it developed to grow miniature livers throughout the body, taking up some of the load — “Transforming a patient’s lymph nodes into bioreactors capable of growing functioning ectopic organs.”

The process involves injecting healthy liver cells, taken from donated organs, into the recipient’s lymph nodes. There, they multiply and grow into functioning mini versions that can support the work of the remaining cells in the original liver.