Aspirin takers are falling down, falling down

Older people who take aspirin daily for, say, cardiovascular health, are more likely to be severely injured by a fall. A 4½-year study of almost 17,000 Australians found that those taking 100mg of aspirin a day were almost 10 percent more likely to have a fall that required hospitalization.

Read that carefully: They aren’t necessarily more likely to fall, they’re more likely to be hospitalized if they do. Speculation is that “People who fall while taking aspirin may have considerable bleeding or bruising, prompting emergency care.”

Speaking of aspirin…

Aspirin, of course, can sometimes cause stomach bleeding. British researchers found that the bleeding is often the result of peptic ulcers — and those, as we know^*, are caused by H. pylori bacteria.

It turns out (after University of Nottingham researchers followed more than 30,000 patients for up to 7 years) that treating the ulcers with a short course of antibiotics also reduces the risk of bleeding from taking aspirin.

Protection occurred rapidly: with those who received placebos, the first hospitalisation for ulcer bleeding occurred after 6 days, compared to 525 days following antibiotic treatment.

* If you don’t know the story of Barry Marshall (now Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall), it’s worth reading.

“Made possible by the Georgia Pharmacy Foundation”

The Georgia Pharmacy Foundation does a ton of good during the year — and it needs your support.

Yes, we’re asking you to give to the foundation.

Keep this in mind: Every penny of your gift goes to support the future of the pharmacy profession in the state.

Take the Leadership GPhA program, supported by a generous grant from the foundation. Every year it trains the next generation of leaders in Georgia pharmacy.

So what? That means you have more time to devote to your patients, your practice, and your career, because these volunteers will be stepping up to support you and work for the entire profession.

Give to the Georgia Pharmacy Foundation today to keep Georgia’s reputation as a pharmacy leader going and going.

We only bug you once a year. So please, make that tax-deductible contribution and give back … while paying it forward.

Mindfulness at work

For anxiety

Don’t tell the people who make escitalopram, but apparently using mindfulness can treat anxiety as well as taking a pill.

A Georgetown University study found that whether taking escitalopram or practicing mindfulness, anxiety in their test subjects declined by about 30 percent — and kept going down.

The big caveat, of course, is that popping a Lexapro takes two seconds, while the mindfulness program requires a weekly 2½-hour class and 45 minutes at home each day.

For hypertension

Doing mindfulness exercises for just a couple of months can lower blood pressure significantly.

A study out of Brown University worked with more than 200 adults over two years and found that not only did the group using mindfulness drop their systolic blood pressure by almost four times as much as the ‘usual care’ group, the mindfulnessians “were more likely to eat heart-healthy foods, report improved perceived stress” and even get off their butts for longer.

The micro-influencers in your gut

A simple way to make cancer drugs work better might be to have patients eat more fiber. The good ol’ gut biome seems to influence the effect of immunotherapy.

The idea — which is being tested now at the University of Texas — is that eating a diet with a lot of fiber encourages the growth of the right bacteria (e.g., Bifidobacterium) and make those meds work better.

It’s already worked with mice to the point that “combining the bacteria with an immunotherapy drug known as a checkpoint inhibitor nearly abolished the tumors.”

The question now is, can simply changing the diet have as much of an impact?

A bit of Covid data

Courtesy of the CDC via Becker’s Hospital Review.

• Covid-19 cases in the US are up by 4.7% in the last week, “the first week of increase seen in more than three months”. Hospitalizations and deaths usually lag by one or two weeks, respectively.
• Two Omicron subvariants — BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 — account for more than a third of cases. These are the subvariants that don’t respond (well) to treatment.
• 80.2% of Americans have had at least one shot of a Covid vaccine
  • 68.5% have received both doses.
    • About 34% have received one booster.
      • About 8% have received an Omicron booster (i.e., a fourth shot)

Double duty: fighting macular degeneration

Drugs for hypertension and diabetes seem to have a nice little side effect: They also reduce the risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

That’s what a big ol’ pooled data analysis led by German and Norwegian researchers confirmed. There had been some anecdotal evidence of the effect, but nothing definitive (and the studies were small). So these folks went big, pooling the results of 14 studies involving 38,694 people.

The pooled data analysis showed that drugs to lower cholesterol or control diabetes were associated with, respectively, 15% and 22% lower prevalence of any type of AMD, after accounting for potentially influential factors.

Virus killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

What if you could kill all the airborne viruses in your pharmacy (or home) with a simple mist — a chemical that’s already been proven safe? Rutgers scientists argue that triethylene glycol should be approved not just for air fresheners and artificial fog, but also for keeping indoor spaces safe.

Why?

It kills all airborne viruses that it’s been tested against, including nonpathogenic surrogates of SARS-CoV-2. It also kills a variety of molds and at least some bacteria, including the one that causes tuberculosis, which also spreads through the air.

But … it hasn’t been approved for use as an antiviral (probably because it’s cheap and can’t be patented and monetized), although the EPA did give it an emergency approval in January 2021 “to be used in certain indoor spaces where social distancing can be challenging.”

Elsewhere

And then there were 11

South Dakotans (Dakotians? Dakoters?) voted overwhelmingly to expand Medicaid there, leaving just 11 states, including Georgia, as holdouts. Whether they voted to help more people get healthcare, or just for those 328 million tasty federal dollars, isn’t clear.

Marijuana legalization

Maryland and Missouri voted to legalize recreational pot; Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota voted No. (This is when we would normally say “recreational marijuana is legal in 19 states plus DC,” but counting is hard because in some places it’s decriminalized but not legal — i.e., on the level of a parking ticket.)