TikTok users rejoice

The FDA has approved Revance’s Daxxify — an alternative to botox that hides frown lines twice (and sometimes three times) as long. This means social media users will have a whole new drug to self-inject and offer untrained medical advice about!

Bonus quote, attributable to either Revance’s CEO or Vladimir Putin: “The most unmet need with toxins is duration.”

Technically true, but …

The headlines: Getting a flu shot reduces your risk of a stroke! (Example)

The reality, if you read the study: Getting the flu increases your risk of stroke, ergo, getting the shot reduces your risk of the flu, which therefore reduces your risk of a stroke.

“This observational study suggests that those who have a flu shot have a lower risk of stroke. To determine whether this is due to a protective effect of the vaccine itself or to other factors, more research is needed.”

Get your flu shot, especially if you’re a man. A ‘man cold’ is bad enough; ‘man flu’ is worse.

The math is easy

If you’re reading this, you (hopefully) appreciate GPhA Buzz for pharma/medical news (and maybe a morning smile).

Imagine Buzz is worth, say, 25¢ a day. That’s about $125 a year.

Toss in a couple of CE discounts or member pricing at the convention, and your GPhA membership just paid for itself. And that’s not counting the laws GPhA helps pass (or the bad ones we stop).

It’s basic math. If you haven’t renewed your GPhA membership yet, now’s the time.

Keep getting Buzz. Keep getting discounts. Keep making connections.

Skin color and temperature

Black people who use those forehead (i.e., temporal artery) thermometers might not be getting accurate readings. Skin color makes a difference.

Emory researchers found that a forehead thermometer was 26% less likely to detect a fever in Black patients than an oral thermometer would. For white patients? Equal odds. The differences in absolute temperature weren’t huge, but when for ‘fever cut-offs’ for triage, it’s a bigger deal.

Their guess is that it’s due to skin emissivity — how human skin radiates heat, which is affected by pigmentation*. But more-detailed research is needed, including whether and how Asian and Hispanic patients are affected.

* If you started thinking about black-body radiation from high school physics, you’re not alone, but this isn’t that. If that were the case, darker skin would read at a higher temperature.

The omicron variant is so bad…

How bad is it? It’s so bad that being unvaccinated means your risk of hospitalization is 10.5 times higher than someone who’s had their shots. (And if you haven’t had a booster? You’re 2.5 times more likely to end up there.)

It wasn’t hard to figure that number — it’s based on data from 192,000 hospitalizations from January 2021 through April 2022.

End the accumulators!

Three patient advocate groups have sued HHS and CMS, asking them to stop allowing copay accumulators.

If you know what those are, you can skip to the next story. If not…

Copay accumulators allow insurers and PBMs to not deduct copay assistance from patients’ deductibles. If someone uses a $100 Pfizer coupon to help pay for a drug, that isn’t counted toward their deductibles. Ergo, they still (sorta) end up paying it.

The insurer receives a windfall by being able to collect payments from the manufacturer and then still collect the full deductible and copayment amounts from the patient.

A 2019 rule broadened the use of copay accumulators, but similar rules from the Trump administration have already been struck down as violating the ACA (which limits how much compensation an insurer can receive). Now these groups want this one gone, too.

Sniffing the honey

How do you treat a Mycobacterium abscessus infection, which affects cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis patients? How about inhaled honey?

Not any ol’ honey, of course. Researchers at Britain’s Aston University (mascot: Cyril the Squirrel) found that nebulized manuka honey — which was already known to have antimicrobial effects — can be combined with the drug amikacin to make the drug work at lower doses (an 87.5% reduction!), thus reducing side effects.

No protein, no baby

For half of couples having trouble conceiving, there’s no explanation for the infertility. But now British and Czech biologists have found what might be an important clue.

A new protein they discovered — they named it Maia, after the Greek god of motherhood — is important for allowing a sperm to fuse to an egg. If there isn’t enough of Maia, most sperm will have a hard time doing what they were meant to do.

That doesn’t mean low levels of Maia are the cause of all the unexplained infertility, but does open a path for study.

[It] will not only allow scientists to better understand the mechanisms of human fertility, but will pave the way for novel ways to treat infertility and revolutionise the design of future contraceptives.”