Paying for weight loss

Employer health plans are paying more and more for weight loss drugs — about $324 per insured member this year, regardless of whether they take the drugs.

In other words, employers are going to be paying a lot more for health coverage going forward because of GLP-1 inhibitors and other expensive drugs. In fact…

[A]verage costs for U.S. employers that pay for their employee health costs are projected to rise 8.5 percent to more than $15,000 per employee in 2024 with a full one percentage point of the total cost, or $150, due to GLP-1 drug spending growth.

Short takes

Contraceptives and fear

Here’s an unexpected side effect of oral contraceptives. According to Canadian researchers, they seem to reduce the part of women’s brains that regulates fear — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

“There is still much to learn when it comes to women’s brains and how they are impacted by [oral contraceptive] use.”

Expanding drug tests

Not only are most drugs not tested on obese people, in some cases those people are specifically ruled out. Considering that something like 40% of Americans are obese, that’s a problem.

Some drugs work differently in people who are obese, and …

… Research suggests that may include antibiotics and antifungal drugs used to treat serious infections, synthetic hormones used in Plan B emergency contraception and even ibuprofen.

Drug shortages’ flip side

We know how problems in the supply chain are causing drug shortages, but for the first time there’s another side — literally. High demand is straining the system, causing shortages (and it’s not just weight loss drugs).

The good-ish side is that there’s a solution to dealing with potential demand spikes: requiring manufacturers to keep a rolling stockpile of drugs … although you never know which ones will see a sudden surge.

Michael Ganio at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists “noted an article about minoxidil, the active ingredient in Rogaine, in the New York Times last year. There was an immediate jump in prescribing for the once-obscure drug following the story.”

Gonorrhea killer

We’re just about out of antibiotics to treat gonorrhea, but there’s good news on the horizon. A new drug, zoliflodacin, just passed its phase 3 trial — a trial that compared it with ceftriaxone, the current last-line treatment for gonorrhea. It worked just as well, it was safe and well tolerated, and most importantly, zoliflodacin works against ceftriaxone-resistant strains of N. gonorrhoeae.

The downsides: Although this is the first new treatment for gonorrhea in decades, it simply becomes the newest last-line drug. And the developers have already found that gonorrhea can develop resistance to it.

But: Zoliflodacin is a first-in-class drug, so there’s always the potential for more to come.

Unexpected gateway drug

If you give your pre-teen a Coke, you’re probably going to have to start hiding the vodka. That’s the finding of Korean psychologists who studied the drinking habits of more than 2,000 American kids: “Nine-to-10-year-olds who drink caffeinated soda daily are twice as likely to try alcohol within a year.”

[T]he results of the study also demonstrate that daily drinkers of caffeinated soda were more impulsive and have a poorer working memory.

Caveat: It might be that kids with poor impulse control are more likely to try both caffeine and alcohol. Either way, if you see a 10-year-old with a Diet Dr Pepper, you can make some educated guesses about his future.

I feel your pain, my dude

There are plenty of people who aren’t happy with how marijuana legalization is spreading. Marijuana users apparently are pretty good at empathizing with them.

Brain imaging indicates enhanced connectivity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region related to empathy, among cannabis users.

Snark aside, this could be a useful finding for treating people with “deficits in social interactions, such as sociopathy, social anxiety, and avoidant personality disorder, among others.”