Stimulants aren’t a gateway

It’s safe to give kids stimulants for ADHD — well, safe in terms of their developing substance abuse issues later in life. This had been a concern, or at least a reason to hesitate prescribing the meds, but a study out of the University of Pittsburgh found there’s nothing to worry about.

The Pitt researchers studied kids over 16 years (!) and found that the chance of a child treated with stimulants turning into a young adult with a drug problem was no greater than kids who didn’t have the meds. On the other hand, taking stimulants didn’t protect the kids from having a substance-abuse problem, either.

Feds prep for fall vax campaigns

Hoping to avoid another “tripledemic^*” this fall, the feds are gearing up to make sure people can get the shots they need to keep their lungs working: for flu, Covid-19, and RSV.

The flu shot is, well, the flu shot. The Covid vaccine will be tuned specifically to the most common XBB variant. And the newly minted RSV shot is particularly important for the youngest and the oldest patients.

“The number of elders who die of viral infection every winter in our intensive care units, and also sometimes in the summer, is large — it’s in the tens of thousands of individuals. Each of these vaccines is a huge win.”

Pro tip: It might be good to space the flu and RSV shots a few weeks apart. There’s some evidence they can interfere with each other.

^*  The fact that it’s still in quotes is a good sign.

Give us a break — we paid for the research: Sanders

When taxpayers pay to develop a drug, they should be getting a fair price for them. Thus a proposal from Sen. Bernie “the Angry Grandpa” Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, that would limit what they could charge when the federal government paid for the research.

The proposal would “mandate price caps for drugs that were developed with the help of government funding” by prohibiting them from exceeding “the lowest price charged for it in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or the U.K.”

Because the US doesn’t do any kind of cost-benefit analysis on the value of a drug (we just pay whatever the drug company feels like charging)…

This move would essentially leave the U.S. price of government-developed drugs in the hands of regulators in Europe, who assess therapies by way of cost-benefit analysis. This system keeps prices in check, much more so than in the U.S.

Drug companies and their champions call this “price setting,” as opposed to what they do which is setting the price.

Alzheimer’s drug is almost here … but

The FDA is poised to approve Eisai/Biogen’s treatment for Alzheimer’s, but it comes with a load of caveats.

First is safety, as three people died during trials. Then there’s cost to patients and taxpayers; the companies are charging $26,000 per year. Then there’s the limited number of specialists who are qualified to determine if it’ll actually help. Finally, the testing involved very few Black patients, and Alzheimer’s seems to affect them differently.

Blacks are up to twice as likely as whites to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, while showing equivalent levels of amyloid in most major studies. No one is sure why, but the hypothesis is that having multiple simultaneous health conditions and being exposed to environmental stressors put Blacks as a group at higher risk.

While Leqembi can’t reverse the signs of dementia, but it at least “delayed cognitive decline by 27% over 18 months.” How much that will actually mean to patients in the real world isn’t clear. That’s why CMS said Medicare will cover the drug, but it will require prescribers “to collect and share data about the drug’s real-world performance.”

Let the computer choose the med

When it comes to hypertension drugs, there’s no one size fits all. Finding the best med can mean a lot of trial and error. So Boston U researchers set a computer on the task, teaching it about previous patient outcomes so the AI can recommend a treatment more likely to work.

In other words, instead of considering just the benefits and risks of various meds, the program “generates a custom hypertension prescription using an individual patient’s profile, giving physicians a list of suggested medications with an associated probability of success” based on how effective a med was with similar patients.

The initial training database was big, too — medical records of almost 43,000 patients over 8 years. It seems to have paid off:

The researchers found [the AI] achieved a 70.3 percent larger reduction in systolic blood pressure than standard of care and performed 7.08 percent better than the second best model.

Lyme vax continues its approach

Slowly but surely, vaccines against Lyme disease are making their way through clinical testing. Valneva’s candidate just passed its phase 1 trial, showing that it’s safe, tolerated, and generally effective. Larger phase 2 trials will further test its effectiveness.

The downside so far is that it seems to require an initial shot and a booster, and then gives about 6 months of protection. As Veterinarian of Buzz told us, Lyme-carrying ticks are around all year, even if they’re most active in summer.