Stand for your BP

Apparently you can get more-accurate blood pressure readings when patients stand up.

The reason is simple, suggest University of Texas researchers: Diagnosing hypertension means knowing what someone’s BP is during normal activity, so just testing while a patient is sittting “has limited sensitivity and reliability as it does not reflect blood pressure in real living situations where we often stand or walk.”

In a nutshell: Testing while seated detected hypertension 43% of the time, while testing while standing detected it 71% of the time. (They compared the results to 24‐hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring to decide on accuracy.)

Lilly joins weight-loss game

Eli Lilly received approval for its tirzepatide drug to treat obesity. Called “Zepbound,” it’s essentially a higher dosage of the company’s diabetes drug Mounjaro, which is already being used off-label for obesity.

With the FDA nod, Lilly now has its answer to Novo’s blockbuster duo of Ozempic for diabetes, and Wegovy for obesity.

Pricing hasn’t been announced, but you can guess it won’t be cheap.

Ladies and gentlemen, come to Asheville

Mark your calendars … no, even better, register now for the 2024 Southeastern Pharmacy Leadership Weekend, January 12-14 at the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.

And yes, this used to be the “Girls of Pharmacy Leadership Weekend, then the “Women of Pharmacy Leadership Weekend,” and now it’s expanded to include any and all genders. It’s got some great speakers lined up and, of course, “plenty of time for spa appointments.”

GPhA members get a $100 discount: It’s just $379 for the weekend if you register by December 1, or $479 after that. Use discount code GAMEMBER24.

Full registration includes participation in all events, event materials, Friday night networking reception, and dinner and two breakfasts. It does not include the hotel, which is $239 per night plus a $20 resort fee. Space in the room block is limited.

Click here for all the details.

Viruses are pairing up

This doesn’t sound good at all: “In a world first, scientists have observed one virus latching onto another.”

Extra creepy: The little purple dude is called a “satellite virus,” and it can’t infect a host cell without the assistance of a “helper virus.” And apparently it’s learned how to hitch a ride on one.

Ketamine in the news

What it (probably) can do

Ketamine can treat PTSD and depression. That’s pretty much been confirmed, and a review of six trials confirmed the confirmations. But there are questions.

It works fast: “Patients receiving ketamine saw their PTSD symptoms reduced by about 25% both at one day and one week after therapy.”

Then things get cloudy. It’s great that ketamine works so fast, but how to keep those benefits coming isn’t clear. (Hence “cloudy.”) Continued injections over a month only helped a bit, leading to the review author to say…

The big unknown with using ketamine for PTSD and depressive symptoms is how often the injections are needed. The data simply is not robust enough to determine whether multiple doses maintain the effects better than simply using a single dose.

What it can’t

Ketamine is in that spot between “we know it does good” and “but we don’t have all the answers,” so shady clinics are all over it. They’re (falsely) advertising benefits for the drug, including lying about its FDA approval status.

Even the preliminary survey by University of Colorado and Johns Hopkins researchers suggests that there are something like 800 clinics doing this across the country.

“There is a big market opportunity for clinics advertising a quick fix. Because ketamine is being used off-label and it’s not really in mainstream psychiatry right now, that’s an environment where you can have these fringe clinics proliferate.”

Lyme bacteria berserker

Duke researchers have created a light-activated “molecular warhead” that annihilates the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

“This transport mechanism gets internalized in the bacterium and brings in a molecule that causes what we’ve described as a berserker reaction — a programmed death response. It wipes out the bacteria — sterilizes the culture with a single dose of light.”

(The obvious question: How would that work in the real world, considering that few people have lights inside their bodies?)

Elsewhere: And then there were 24

Ohio on Tuesday became the 24th state to legalize recreational marijuana. The state plans to cash in, with a 10% sales tax “to be spent on administrative costs, addiction treatment, municipalities with dispensaries, and social equity and jobs programs supporting the industry itself.”

(The law can actually be changed by the legislature, but that has some serious political risks.)