Automated statin scripts

Statins can be life-saving, but for reasons, they aren’t always prescribed for patients who could use them. How can you get them to more people who could benefit?

Have a computer nudge the prescriber. Or, to sound less creepy, “use automated referral” to get a message to a pharmacist: This patient could use statins. The pharmacist calls the patient, gets the important info, and works with the doctor to get a prescription.

This comes from a UPenn experiment with a group of primary care practices. The goal was to see if they could increase statin use by bringing pharmacists into the loop^*. And it worked:

Patients in the intervention-arm practices saw a significant increase in statin prescription rates, with 31.6 percent prescribed a statin, compared with 15.2 percent in usual care practices.

Not content with “This is cool,” they had to take the next step and call it — you guessed it — a game-changer.

^* Technically “loupe” but that’s a losing argument

Taurine and depression

Taurine is commonly known an ingredient in energy drinks or as a supplement to ease the jitters from caffeine. But there might be more to it: Korean researchers found that women with depression have lower taurine levels in their hippocampus.

They actually measured levels of choline, creatine, glutamine, glutamate, myo-inositol, N-acetyl aspartate, and taurine in various brain regions of women with major depressive disorder, but only found the depression-taurine link.

Of course this doesn’t imply causation, but it’s interesting to note — a “novel characteristic of MDD,” as they put it. So, of course, more research is needed.

Express Scripts to offer fixed-price option

Seeing the success of Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus mail-order pharmacy (cash only with a markup of 15% + $5.00 above wholesale), Express Scripts (ESI) is jumping on that bandwagon.

Next year, ESI customers will have the option to either pay the standard co-pay, or “15% above [the pharmacy’s] wholesale costs, plus an extra fee for dispensing the medicines.” That 15% will be shared between ESI and the pharmacy. And unlike Cost Plus, the ESI pricing will be available for both brand name and generic drugs.

What’s not clear:

• How will that 15% be divided?
• Will it also cover controlled meds? (Cost Plus does not.)
• Will patients be able to use on a per-script basis, or will they have to choose this plan for all their meds?

CBD vs dental pain

CBD, it seems, “alleviates acute dental pain,” according to Rutgers researchers.

This first-of-its-kind result appears in the Journal of Dental Research and indicates that CBD, which produces no “high” among users, may be an equally effective but far safer alternative to addictive opioid painkillers.

Not enough? How about “the compound improved tooth function and thus may prove particularly beneficial for those with dental pain that affects their ability to chew”?

The more you know.

An mRNA vax for Lyme?

Research out of UPenn and Yale has developed another candidate for a human^* Lyme disease vaccine. This one is based on mRNA technology^†, in contrast to the ‘standard’ Lyme vax currently in phase 3 trials.

The researchers who developed the mRNA shot say theirs is better — it induces more memory B cells and more “antibody-producing, long-lived plasma cells within their bone marrow.”

Sounds good to us.

All that said, this vaccine is still in the mouse-testing phase, so it’ll be a while before anything comes of it, while other Lyme vaccines are much closer to market.

^* Dogs already have one.
^† “a lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-encapsulated, nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine that encodes the outer surface protein A (OspA) from B. burgdorferi”

Another new weight loss drug

This one has its own twist: It seems to combat fatty liver disease.

Eli Lilly’s upcoming entry into the GLP-1 wars, retatrutide, not only helped people lose weight, but “also culled excessive fat from around the livers of obese people,” according to a study out of VCU — in other words, it cures fatty liver disease.

[P]eople given the smaller 8 milligram (mg) dose of retatrutide experienced an average 81.7% reduction in their liver fat, the team reported. Those given the 12 mg dose experienced an average 86% reduction in liver fat.

It’s still in the testing phase, of course, giving other companies a chance to see if their drugs also have that effect.

First home STD test a-comin’

The FDA has approved the first home test for chlamydia and gonorrhea. LetsGetChecked’s Simple 2 Test won’t give results at home — the samples need to be sent to a lab — but it’s the first such test that doesn’t need to be done in a clinicians office. Pricing hasn’t been set, but you’ll probably see them on your shelves soon enough.