Bitter battle won?

No one likes a bitter drug — coffee being the exception — and usually the solution is “Buck up, little soldier.” But there might be a solution, according to the folks at the Monell Chemical Senses Center (“Advancing discovery in taste and smell”): rosiglitazone, the diabetes drug. Apparently it can be added to other medications to make them taste better.

It’s not perfect, but they see it as a good first step towards building a better bitter blocker. For now, though, “Rosiglitazone is valuable as a bitter blocker because it is potentially effective in most people and is part of a class of drugs already approved worldwide for treating diabetes.”

Lilly loses another case

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent pharmacists from creating compounded versions of their GLP-1 drugs while those drugs are in shortage. Lilly just lost again in Florida where a judge tossed the company’s suit saying that it can’t “use state law as a back door to pri­vate­ly en­force” federal law — specifically the Food, Drug, and Cos­met­ic Act.

The FDA is pretty clear: If a drug is in shortage, compounding it is AOK. (We’ll point out that the argument “XYZ Pharmacy is claiming to sell Ozempic™” is a legit trademark issue, but that’s different than “XYZ can’t sell compounded semaglutide.”)

Hormones after 65? You bet

Just because you’ve hit 65, ladies, doesn’t mean you have to give up on hormone therapy. That’s according to the North American Menopause Society^* — a new paper it published says, essentially, that fears of cancer and heart disease are unfounded … sort of. Rather, the risk is nuanced:

A new large-scale study based on the records of 10 million senior Medicare women from 2007 to 2020, however, suggests that the implications of HT [hormone therapy] use beyond age 65 years vary by type, route, and dose.

In other words, ‘there is no general rule for stopping hormone therapy in a woman based on age alone.’

^* It now identifies simply as “The Menopause Society”

Short takes

Georgia gets another measles case

Georgia got its third measles case this year according to the Department of Public Health. And no, this person wasn’t vaccinated. (He or she came here with an international group of students and is now in hospital recovering.)

Three is a nice low number, but given how contagious measles is, fingers crossed that it stays low thanks to most people being vaccinated.

19 years down the drain?

On that subject …

With 113 cases in the US so far this year, the country is poised to lose the measles-elimination status that it achieved almost 20 years ago. What does that mean? Essentially that measles cases have reached the tipping point where the disease is spreading faster than it can be contained and outbreaks continue. (“[T]here won’t be any economic, political, or practical penalties.”)

While anti-vaxxers might celebrate, keep in mind that 68% of kids who contracted measles in the last couple of years required hospitalization, as well as 56% of people overall.

Marijuana vs dementia

The effects of marijuana continue to come fast and furious now that researchers can actually research it. The latest is on the plus side: Non-medical cannabis use is linked to “a lower likelihood of experiencing subjective cognitive decline.”

Subjective cognitive decline is all about how participants answered the question, “During the past 12 months, have you experienced confusion or memory loss that is happening more often or is getting worse?”

Individuals who used cannabis for non-medical reasons reported significantly reduced odds of experiencing subjective cognitive decline compared to those who did not use cannabis. This suggests that non-medical cannabis use, as opposed to medical or mixed-use, might have a protective association against the self-perception of cognitive decline.

What was interesting to the SUNY Upstate Medical University researchers was that why people used cannabis (i.e., recreationally vs. medically) was more important than how much or what type they used. Regardless, if it turns out to be true, Shaggy and Scooby will probably be doing pretty well in their old age.

Elsewhere: “I shouldn’t have looked”

This year New York implemented a new pricing-transparency law that showed just how much money PBMs got from transactions with independent pharmacies. And when they saw how much money they were losing, “Nearly all independent pharmacies surveyed across New York have stopped selling certain name-brand medications.”

[P]roviders are more aware that they can lose more than $200 each time they dispense certain prescriptions. […] The most common medications they’ve stopped selling to avoid such losses include weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, Merck’s diabetes medication Januvia, and Bristol Myers Squibb’s blood thinner Eliquis. Respondents also said they’ve ceased selling Symbicort, which treats asthma, and Biktarvy, an antiretroviral medication to treat HIV and AIDS.

As a spokesman for the New York City Pharmacists Society explained, “It is not sustainable economically for them to carry these drugs.”

Cat news

One flew over the catbox

Yes, owning a cat can increase your risk of schizophrenia. A new Aussie meta analysis of 17 studies found that “cat exposure is associated with an increased risk of broadly defined schizophrenia-related disorders” but not, however, for “psychotic-like experiences.”

The big caveat is that almost all of those studies show correlation rather than causation, so it might be that whatever causes someone to want a cat also causes them to develop schizophrenia^*.

(Above link goes to the paper. For the news story click here.)

^* Yes, there are jokes to be made here, but they would be in bad taste so we’ll let you make them behind closed doors.

Fungus among them (and us)

A couple of cats in Kansas caught a rare fungal infection called sporotrichosis. Normally that’s not news, but the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (and later the CDC) got involved when one of the cats scratched a vet tech and gave the infection to her.

They didn’t diagnose the fungal infection quickly enough, so results could have been better.

The vet tech was put on an antifungal for eight months, and her infection cleared. The first cat also got an antifungal, but she eventually got sicker, and her owners had her euthanized. The second cat was treated much more quickly and recovered.