Aspartame anxiety

If you’re feeling anxious, maybe you’ll reach for a nice, refreshing Diet Dr Pepper. For the sake of you and your children, don’t. (At least if you’re a mouse.)

Aspartame, say Florida State University medical researchers, not only increases anxiety in mice, but thanks to epigenetics also makes their children and grandchildren more anxious.

The mice didn’t even had a lot — the equivalent of three or four 12-oz. cans of diet soda a day over 12 weeks. But that was enough to generate “Pronounced anxiety-like behavior […] across multiple generations.” Good news: a dose of diazepam fixed ’em good.

Next week: two webinars (one free!)

Just three weeks to go to have all your CE requirements met for 2022! <br

Don’t panic! GPhA has two live webinars coming next week (and plenty more on demand).

Antimicrobial stewardship in the outpatient setting

Boring title, important topic. Learn why — and more importantly how — pharmacists and technicians can help prevent the spread of drug-resistant microbes. (Did you think you couldn’t? Think again!)

Just $20 for 1 hour of CPE!

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 • 7:30 – 8:30pm

Hormonal contraception

As you might expect, contraception is more important than ever in Georgia. So what’s the pharmacist’s role? We’ve got a thorough dive into this challenging, modern topic — be ready to help your patients!

Free free free (as in beer)! Thursday, December 15, 2022 • 7:30 – 8:30am

A spray for sleep apnea

A few years from now, thanks to Aussie researchers, there might be a nasal spray to treat sleep apnea.

The drug they developed triggers receptors on the on the surface of the upper airways so they “activate the surrounding muscles to keep the airway open during sleep.” A small, preliminary human study looked good, but you know the mantra: More research is needed.

The initial results were strong, with the novel drug generating sustained opening of airways across a whole night’s sleep. Most importantly, the results were consistent regardless of application method, meaning a simple nasal spray could be the easiest way to deliver the treatment.

Hormones fight delirium

Older women with urinary tract infections often experience delirium, and Cedars-Sinai docs think they’ve found an easy treatment: hormone replacement therapy.

UTIs happen to increase levels of the interleukin 6 protein, and higher levels of IL-6 can cause disorientation and confusion. But estrogen suppresses IL-6.

So they tried HRT as a treatment, and bingo.

When they treated the mice with estrogen, levels of IL-6 in the blood and delirium-like behavior were greatly reduced.

And it wasn’t just that estrogen suppressed the IL-6 — it also protected the neurons directly. (They’re trying to figure out how.)

Next up: Sussing out the details and seeing how men might be treated as well.

Antibodies out; antivirals in

Monoclonal antibodies don’t work against the current strains of Covid-19; earlier this month, the FDA crossed the last one off the list of Covid treatments.

The good news is that antiviral drugs — molnupiravir, nirmatrelvir, and remdesivir — do work against the latest Omicron sub-varients, BQ.1.1 and XBB. And, in case people somehow get exposed to the OG strain, they also work against that.

Antivirals need to be taken quickly, so if you know someone who tests positive, they need to hie it to a prescriber for their Paxlovid (a combo of nirmatrelvir and remdesivir).

Boomers: OG is original gangsta — the original and “best.”
Millennials: Hie means to hurry or go quickly.
The more you know.

Philosophers tackle PBMs

What happens when you ask a bunch of philosophers — say, Kant, Rawls, Dworkin, Bentham, Mill, Confucius, Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, Bradley, Epictetus, and Sartre — what they think of PBM practices?

First, you get in trouble for raising the dead. But then you get a paper, “An Ethical Analysis of Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) Practices.” Which is just what two pharmacists at Drake University did.

They considered various measures of ethical value, then they applied them to common PBM practices: market consolidation, pharmacy reimbursement rate, gag clauses, exclusion lists, and point of sale rebates.

Result: Overall, most PBM practices were considered unethical by most philosophers. The exception was point-of-sale rebates, which got thumbs ups.

They all agreed that the pitiful pharmacy reimbursement rates were unethical. The other practices … well, they didn’t all agree, but the consensus was to make those PBMs drink the hemlock.

(Above link goes to the study, but click here to jump right to the table that shows the results.)

Turning yeast into a narc

Yeast cells are like Kardashians: All they seem to do is “eat and propagate.” But now those shifty Danes have not only given yeast a taste for cannabinoids, they’ve made it glow when it eats them.

“We have made a living sensor out of the yeast cell, which can now sense cannabinoids or molecules that have the same function as cannabinoids.”

Not only can it detect the cannabinoids we know about, it can also find new ones with similar properties. Oh, and it doesn’t have to be cannabinoids, either — “in principle, they could have done so for opioids or any other group of medicinal substances.”

This means, they explain, that yeast can be programmed to look for other, undiscovered pharmaceutical compounds, cheaply enough for smaller labs to use. In fact, they created a portable device that can be connected to a powerful pocket computer — aka a smartphone — to use these yeast-based tests anywhere.