Psychedelics and PTSD

A pharmacy professor at UConn suggests that “Psychedelics may better treat depression and anxiety symptoms than prescription antidepressants for patients with advanced cancer”.

The logic is simple (and he’s got some meta analysis to back it up): Psychedelics can often help treat people with PTSD, and a diagnosis of cancer or other life-threatening disease often leads to a form of that.

We found that taking psychedelic medication alone – specifically LSD, psilocybin or MDMA – reduced depression scores as measured by the Beck’s Depression Inventory by six points, where a score below 10 indicates minimal to no depression.

An important caveat: This isn’t a case of giving them these meds and sending them home. Treatment with psychedelics involves a combination of monitored drug use and psychotherapy. And, as always, “More research is needed.”

Clean your business with Mollie Durham

Spring is here, spring is here — and now’s the time to take a good, hard look at your pharmacy and where you want it to go. Mollie Durham, PharmD, is here to help with a two-part virtual course giving you the tools you need (and the enthusiasm to use them!) to know where you are and where you want to be and then take smart, actionable, realistic steps to get there.

Each part is just an hour long (and gives 1 hour of CPE credit), but it’ll pay years of dividends.

Part 1: Where Am I, and Where Do I Want to Be? Wednesday, May 10; 7:00 – 8:00 pm via Zoom

Part 2: How do I Get Where I’m Going? Wednesday, May 17; 7:00 – 8:00 pm via Zoom

Each part is just $35 for GPhA members and $45 for non-members.

Spring Covid boosters for some

The FDA has said that people 65 and older, or immunocompromised, will be allowed to get yet another Covid vaccine booster as soon as CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky signs off. (Only the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech bivalent vaccines are covered).

People 65 and older should only get another shot if at least four months have elapsed since their most recent booster, according to the recommendation. For people who are immunocompromised, the suggested interval between shots is two months.

Yet another (potential) male contraceptive!

Mammals, it seems, have a gene that’s expressed only in testicular tissue — the first one of the sort ever found. This is interesting for two reasons. First, if the gene is missing it leads to the most common form of male infertility.

But more important for headlines, that means it’s also a target for “a highly effective, reversible and non-hormonal male contraceptive for humans and animals.” That’s because of what Washington State University molecular biologists found:

When they knocked out the gene in mice, it created infertility only in the males, impacting their sperm count, movement and shape. [We assume they mean the sperm’s movement and shape, not the males’.]

In theory — remember, testing has only started — “you could remove the drug and the sperm would start being built normally again.”

Covid might be causing 5% of diabetes cases

The idea that Covid-19 could increase diabetes risk isn’t new; we wrote about it back in January.

But now comes the first evidence — a whopping 1 in 20 new cases could be a result of Covid infection. That’s what Canadian researchers found when they examined the health records of 630,000 Canucks…

…and found those who tested positive were significantly more likely to experience a new diagnosis of type 1 or type 2 diabetes in the following weeks and months — with 3-5% of new diabetes cases attributable to Covid overall.

And in case your inner scientist is wondering: “Assuming the virus is directly to blame, the underlying mechanism also still needs to be teased out.”

CDC updates immunization schedule

With the pandemic mostly behind us, the CDC has updated its immunization schedule (like it says in the headline) to account for missed vaccinations, the addition of Covid shots, and some small changes to existing vaccination recommendations. (There are a few other tweaks, like ones involving polio and dengue fever, that hopefully you won’t encounter.)

New COVID-19 vaccines, new abbreviations for COVID-19 vaccine products, and revised text for vaccine injury compensation were included in the updates. The pneumococcal vaccine has also been added to the catch-up schedule…

Bad gums, bad arthritis

If you have a patient who keeps getting bouts of arthritis, here’s some advice you can pass on: Visit your dentist.

Rockefeller University clinical investigators found that bad gums can lead almost directly to autoimmune flareups, like those of rheumatoid arthritis.

[B]reaches in damaged gums allow bacteria in the mouth to seep into the bloodstream, activating an immune response that ultimately pivots to target the body’s own proteins and causes arthritis flare-ups.

As one researcher put it, taking care of your teeth is kind of a no-brainer: “Gum disease is quite curable; rheumatoid arthritis can be much more difficult to treat.”

Short take

Purple cancer fighter?

The latest drug candidate to emerge from traditional Chinese medicine comes from a compound called indirubin, a natural dye that can be extracted from certain plants. It seems to improve the survival of mice with glioblastoma, and the Brown researchers working on it say they’re actually close to starting human trials.

“That’s appealing because this type of cancer keeps finding ways around individual mechanisms of attack. So if we use multiple mechanisms of attack at once, perhaps that will be more successful.”