This is your brain on diabetes

You don’t want type 2 diabetes, of course, but you definitely don’t want it for the long haul. Apparently it can literally change the structure of your brain. That’s what University of Michigan researchers found after doing tests — including MRI scans — on 51 people with type 2 diabetes.

Brain imaging suggested that study participants with longer durations of type 2 diabetes had decreased mean cortical thickness and gray matter volumes, and an increased volume of white matter hyperintensities.

The good news is that even though they saw those physical changes in the brain, the participants’ cognition wasn’t affected. Still, they said, the fact that the brain is affected suggests that diabetics might need to be screened early and often for cognitive disorders.

Drug shortages continue

Three more cancer drugs are now in shortage per the FDA: decitabine injection^* (50 mg solution), doxorubicin liposomal injection, and methotrexate tablets. That is all.

^* “Hospitals are recommended to evaluate current supply and consider alternative regimens for a drug that lacks a replacement agent.”

Systemic Covid

Even after Covid-19 has left the lungs, it’s still causing “mitochondrial dysfunction” in other organs including the heart, kidneys, and liver. That, say researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, could be the cause of long Covid.

[O]ver time, mitochondrial function in the lungs is restored, while in other organs, particularly the heart, mitochondrial function remains impaired.

Their conclusion: “[W]e need to stop looking at Covid-19 as strictly an upper respiratory disease and start viewing it as a systemic disorder that impacts multiple organs.”

What the (drug) traffic will bear

So the AARP looked at the prices of the top 25 drugs Medicare Part D’s money goes to. In a shock to no one, pharma companies have jacked up those prices over and over — in all but one case (Trelegy Ellipta) well above the rate of inflation.

Our analysis found that list prices for the top 25 drugs have increased by an average of 226 percent—or more than tripled—since they first entered the market. These lifetime price increases ranged from 20 percent to 739 percent.

In other words, the drug makers didn’t just introduce these drugs at a high price, they continued to raise and raise and raise those prices … because they could. And thanks to math the longer a drug is on the market, the higher the price goes, even relative to inflation.

Oh, and as far as that long-disproven argument about recouping R&D costs?

No clear rationale exists for prescription drug price increases given that launch prices ostensibly reflect the costs associated with developing the drug and future research costs.

“These findings,” the organization writes, “highlight the importance of the Inflation Reduction Act and its inflation-based rebates that will require drug companies to pay Medicare when they increase their prices faster than inflation.”

Heart med boosts melanoma treatment

Here’s one of those odd twists: If you give a mouse melanoma, you might also want to give it ranolazine, the heart medication. Why? Apparently it can improve the efficacy of melanoma treatments.

Spanish researchers, looking at how tumors can develop resistance to standard melanoma therapies, found that, among other things, ranolazine “increases the visibility of melanoma cells to the immune system, thereby improving response to immunotherapies and increasing the ability of lymphocytes to control tumour growth.”

ICYMI: SCOTUS nixes Purdue Pharma deal

The Sackler family had won a concession — part of the big Purdue/Oxycontin deal — that the family itself would be shielded from liability. The Justice Department didn’t like that, and now the Supreme Court has sorta-kinda ruled in its favor, a hold on the deal until it can review it, with arguments starting in December.