Patients know what works

What happens when you let patients choose their own diabetes medication? It turns out they pick the right one.

British researchers gave people with type 2 diabetes three medications: canagliflozin, pioglitazone, and sitagliptin — and told to try each in succession. They then chose which one made them feel best. Lo and behold, that also turned out the be the one that lowered glucose most effectively and resulted in fewer side effects.

“[W]e found that the treatment people chose was usually the one which gave them best blood sugar control — even before they knew those results.”

Yes, it’s your job too

Learn why — and more importantly how — pharmacies and pharmacists can do their part to help prevent the spread of drug-resistant microbes (and get an hour of CE, too).

GPhA presents “Antimicrobial stewardship in the outpatient setting” with UGA clinical professor Chris Bland, PharmD

It’s this coming Tuesday, December 13, from 7:30 – 8:30pm at your favorite Internet hot spot. It’s part of our December, last-chance-for-CE “Unwanted Gifts” series!

Click here for info and to register!

They’re growing up so fast

Congrats to the four pharmacies (and one pharma company) that made the 2023 Bulldog 100 list — the top fastest growing organizations in Georgia!

• Crawford & Breazeale Drug Co. (Lincolnton) — Academy of Independent Pharmacy member
• Golden Isles Pharmacy (Brunswick) — Academy of Independent Pharmacy member
• PharmD on Demand (Watkinsville) — Academy of Employee Pharmacists supporter
• Poole’s Pharmacy (Marietta) — Academy of Independent Pharmacy member

Another blow to Humira

Express Scripts will add a biosimilar for Abbvie’s $50,000 a year Humira to its preferred drug list for 2023, following OptumRx’s similar decision. How Abbvie will cope with the undercutting of its 20-year-old blockbuster (did we mention it’s $50,000 a year?) has yet to be seen.

RSV vax awaits approval

The FDA will be giving Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for adults (RSVpreF) a priority review — and by “priority” we mean that it should reach a decision by May 2023.

RSV (along with flu and good ol’ Covid-19) is causing hospitals to fill, mostly with sick children. But RSVpreF would be for people 60 and over (at least for now) because they’re the most vulnerable.

The vaccine was 85.7% effective among participants with three or more symptoms, and 66.7% for two or more symptoms, according to an interim analysis carried out by an external data monitoring panel.

Why has it taken so long to get an RSV vax? Because the previous one, tested in 1966 (and presumably made with tree bark and rose quartz), ended up making 80% of kids sick and killing two. “That,” said one researcher, “stymied vaccine development for 50, 60 years in this field.”

Pharma companies score big wins

Merck got some good news when a a federal judge threw out nearly 1,200 court cases against against the company, where plaintiffs claimed shingles vax Zostavax actually caused their shingles. But they couldn’t prove it was the vaccine that caused the disease without doing testing at the time they were sick.

“Plaintiffs concede that it cannot be determined which strain of the virus caused shingles simply by how the rash appears.”

And Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Pfizer, and Sanofi had 50,000 federal lawsuits alleging that Zantac caused cancer thrown out “as a judge found the claims were not backed by sound science.” The companies still face a bunch of state-level suits.

[E]xpert witnesses the plaintiffs planned to use to establish that Zantac can cause cancer could not be admitted in court because they “systemically utilized unreliable methodologies” and showed “a lack of internally consistent, objective, science-based standards for the evenhanded evaluation of data.”

The pollen is coming

As temperatures rise, southern species are moving north. That means more than just armadillos in North Dakota — it includes plants … and allergens.

In short, people are going to be exposed to more and different pollens as the weather warms and wettens. Pollen season (suggest Rutgers researchers^*) “will start earlier and last longer throughout the U.S., with increasing average pollen concentrations in most parts of the nation.”

^* I always hear “Rutgers researchers” in Scooby-Doo’s voice.

FDA taps the brakes

The FDA is slowing down its expedited drug approval program as Congress and people inside the agency are giving it the side-eye.

Academics have long complained that the practice has resulted in a glut of expensive, unproven medications, particularly for cancer. But last year’s accelerated approval of a much-debated Alzheimer’s drug touched off a new round of criticism, including investigations of FDA’s decision making by federal inspectors and Congress.

One issue is that when a medication is granted accelerated approval, the drugmaker is supposed to follow up with additional data — which at least 40 percent don’t, but the agency has a tough time revoking its approval. (It’s now telling pharma companies that follow-up studies must at least be underway.)

Vitamin D in your mind

Your brain has vitamin D in it. This may not sound like a big deal, but until Tufts researchers actually cut into a few heads, we didn’t know that.

But wait, there’s more: In studying patients with cognitive decline, they found that those with “higher levels of vitamin D in their brains had better cognitive function.”

But why? They don’t know. In fact, vitamin D levels didn’t correlate with any other factors (e.g., amyloid plaque buildup) — just cognitive function overall.

“[W]e need to do more research to identify the neuropathology that vitamin D is linked to in the brain before we start designing future interventions.”

For women only

One of the cool things about rapamycin is that it seems to help reverse aging. It’s technically for organ-transplant recipients, but its anti-aging properties have been known for a while and are still being investigated.

But now there’s been a major setback. Rapamycin, it seems, may only reverse aging in women. German researchers found that, at least in fruit flies, “rapamycin only slowed the development of age-related pathological changes in the gut in female [fruit] flies.”

[R]apamycin increased autophagy — the cell’s waste disposal process — in the female intestinal cells. Male intestinal cells, however, already seem to have a high basal autophagy activity, which cannot be further increased by rapamycin.