Shingles vax — timing doesn’t matter

When someone over 50 gets a shingles vaccination, the second shot is supposed to come about 6 months after the first. But a new study out of Kaiser Permanente (based on records of 2 million people) found that it’s okay to wait longer — the effectiveness doesn’t change.

The caveat: The study doesn’t say how much longer you can wait, just “not to panic if your second dose ended up being delayed beyond 6 months.”

That second dose is important.

The study found 2 doses were 76% effective against shingles, while 1 dose was 64% effective. Over the 4-year period, the 2-dose regimen waned little while the single dose waned more, dropping to 52% after the third year.

La France envoie de la pénicilline

With STDs on the rise in the US, it’s a bad time for a penicillin shortage. That’s what we have, though, with Pfizer’s Bicillin hard to find. That’s why the FDA is allowing a French version from Laboratoires Delbert to be imported. While not officially FDA approved, this penicillin G benzathine (called Extencilline) is pretty much the same as Pfizer’s drug, plus it’s French so it’s all fancy.

Laboratoires Delbert noted that it will import 1,200,000 units of its powdered Extencilline and 2,400,000 units of the diluent version for reconstitution for injection. The meds are manufactured in Italy and both lots have an expiration date of 2025.

The super-popular APhA immunization course is back!

Woo-hoo! GPhA is offering “APhA’s Pharmacy-Based Immunization Delivery: A Certificate Program for Pharmacists” for the first time in 2024: Sunday, February 25 from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm at the GPhA World Headquarters in Sandy Springs.

This is the big kahuna of immunization training — it gives you a total of 23 hours of CE.

The live portion (8 hours) is being held in GPhA’s classroom. The rest is self study — easy peasy. At the end you get a spiffy certificate for your wall and the important line on your CV to impress your patients and your boss.

The whole shebang is $349 for GPhA members ($499 for non-members).

Note: This is always a popular course, so the sooner you sign up the less your chance of being left out and being laughed at behind your back.

Get to GPhA.org/immunization for the details and to register. Now!

Your brain can make you live longer

No, not just with mindfulness or by telling you to skip the party-size bag of M&Ms. The hypothalamus, it seems, sends signals to white (adipose) fat tissue: burn, baby, burn*. When mice get older, though, their hypothalami produce less of a molecule called Ppp1r17†, making the brain-fat signalling loop less effective.

So scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found a way to activate the neurons that cause Ppp1r17 to be produced. When they gave this treatment to mice, those mice lived about 6 to 7% longer than controls — that’s the equivalent of five years longer for humans.

Obviously this is in the early stages, but heck, it can’t hurt to dream about what you might do with five extra years.

* The details are a lot more complex, but that’s the gist.
† Also the name of Elon Musk’s second child

Calcium vs preeclampsia

Pregnant women only need about 500 mg of calcium a day to reduce their preeclampsia risk. “Only” because that’s a third of what the WHO currently recommends. That’s big news, especially for women in poorer countries; governments there provide supplements to pregnant women but can’t afford to give out that much calcium.

A study out of India, Tanzania, and the US found that 500 mg and 1,500 mg daily were equally good at keeping blood pressure lower (although the higher dose was slightly better at reducing the risk of preterm birth). That means those countries might be able to afford to supplement women after all.

Side note: It’s not clear why calcium has that effect — it might reduces contractions in the uterus to lower blood pressure — but the study included 22,000 women, so it clearly does work.

ICYMI: Blood drive

Give blood. The Red Cross is appealing to everyone to take some time and donate blood — there’s a national shortage at the moment, and it’s going to get worse with so many people getting sick.

The number of people volunteering to donate blood is at the lowest level in 20 years, and over the past two decades, the number who donate through the Red Cross has fallen about 40.

It’s reached the point that some smaller blood centers are working with a supply that might only last a day.

Click here or call 1-800-RED-CROSS to find a donation site and make an appointment.

 

Can you trust the DSM?

Apparently the “M” in DSM stands for “May not be objective.” It turns out that an eye-bulging 60% of the physicians who helped put together the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “received payments from industry totalling $14.24 million.”

Because of the enormous influence of diagnostic and treatment guidelines, the researchers say their findings “raise questions about the editorial independence of this diagnostic manual.”

Good news about hot flashes

Bayer says its elinzanetant — a drug candidate designed to reduce hot flashes and improve sleep — has done well in two phase-3 trials “reducing the frequency and severity of vasomotor symptoms, also known as hot flashes, in postmenopausal women.”

The company could be asking for FDA approval soon. It’ll be in the footsteps of Astellas’s fezolinetant (Veoza to its friends), which was approved last year.

Today’s Covid update

For the week ending December 9, 2023, 163 Americans died from the flu. And 1,614 died from Covid-19.

Yes, that’s about 1/7th the weekly deaths as during the worst of the pandemic, but with fewer than 1 in 5 Americans having received the latest vaccine, a lot of those deaths were preventable.

Perspective: Imagine if five airliners were crashing in the US every week — people would be pretty darned concerned, wouldn’t they?

Captain Obvious … actually, the captain sits this one out

At first the headline seemed rather, well, obvious: “Reduced drug use is a meaningful treatment outcome for people with stimulant use disorders.” Of course reducing drug use by drug over-users is a good thing.

But what the article is actually saying is that if someone is addicted to stimulants, just getting them to cut back is a win — you don’t have to have them quit entirely: “[A]bstinence should be neither the sole aim nor only valid outcome of treatment.”