Georgia cannabis dispensaries open

It may have taken years for Georgia to go from “we’ll approve medical-cannabis oil dispensaries,” to “here are the first licenses,” but once those licenses were issued, the first two pharmacies were open within a day (in Macon and Marietta), and two more are scheduled for June and July.

The [medical-cannabis oil] registry currently has around 27,000 patients. But it’s expected to grow quickly now that the first pharmacies are open.

Do you know where you’re going?

On May 17, Mollie Durham will help you figure that out. It’s part 2 of our spring-cleaning webinar special, following “Where Am I, and Where Do I Want to Be?” (now available on demand) — it’s How do I Get Where I’m Going?

Put together an action plan with specific goals to give your pharmacy business the boost it needs to thrive.

It’s just an hour long (and gives 1 hour of CPE credit), but it’ll pay years of dividends.

Spring Cleaning: How do I Get Where I’m Going? is Wednesday, May 17 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm via Zoom. It’s just $35 for GPhA members and $45 for non-members.

The oxytocin-autism connection

Amongst other uses, oxytocin is important for the kinds of ‘social interaction and emotional control’ that often plague people on the autism spectrum. (It’s been assumed that oxytocin deficiency might play a part in autism.)

Swiss researchers have found an interesting connection. They found that people with a rare disease that causes vasopressin deficiency has those patients showing similar issues to autism — but here’s the important part — those issues remain even with vasopressin treatment.

That means two things. First, “[D]isorders that cause vasopressin deficiency could also affect the neurons that produce oxytocin.”

Second, a bit of testing with MDMA proved^* that yes, oxytocin deficiency is a thing, and that it has those autism-like effects. What treatments could this lead to? More research is needed.

^* All right, this is science so maybe “Seems to clearly indicate, at least in these early stages.”

Alzheimer’s treatment still begs questions

Yes, the latest Alzheimer’s treatment, Eli Lilly’s donanemab, has had some solid trial results. It certainly seems to slow the disease, and do it better than other treatments. But the big question remains: How much difference will that really make on the ground? The benefits are modest, the cost is sky-high, and the potential dangers are real.

When we look at a trial and we see this slightly different increase or slowing down in the clinical score … it’s hard to tell what that means for a patient. For a patient who has early Alzheimer’s, it’s very difficult to understand how that minor change in score correlates with their function.”

GLP-1s can help cancer treatment

First they were diabetes drugs, then weight-loss drugs, and now GLP-1 analogs might also be anti-cancer drugs.

Not that they attack cancer directly, but by fighting obesity, they allow the body’s natural killer immune cells to better do their jobs.

As one Irish researcher put it: “We are finally reaching the point where medical treatments for the disease of obesity are being shown to prevent the complications of having obesity.”

Insert a ringworm-pun title here

Ringworm a yucky and very contagious skin disease, as you know. But luckily it’s easily treated and contained with a bit of antifungals and not shaking hands for a bit.

Unless its the treatment-resistant kind, which just appeared in the US of A. Two patients, and now their close family members were infected, “raising alarm” with health officials. (They were eventually treated, but it wasn’t easy.)

The good news is that they were in New York City, which is enough of a backwater that it’s unlikely to spread by travellers to other regions.

Short TakeS

Saving you a click: Pinpointing suicidal thoughts

The title: “Research pinpoints the time of year and hour when people have the strongest suicidal thoughts”.

The answer: The thoughts are strongest in December, between 4:00 and 5:00am, but it takes months for people to act, meaning the highest suicide and suicide-attempt rate is in spring and early summer.

Short on vitamin D, long on Covid

A new addition to the possible risk factors for long Covid: vitamin D deficiency.

Italian researchers wanted to see if vitamin D might play a role in long Covid, so they tested their idea on 100 Covid-19 outpatients. And what d’ya know, the ones who ended up with long Covid had overall lower vitamin D levels. This was just a preliminary study, but it opens a door for more research (which is always needed).

Our data suggest that vitamin D levels should be evaluated in Covid-19 patients after hospital discharge. The role of vitamin D supplementation as a preventive strategy of Covid-19 sequelae should be tested in randomized controlled trials.

(Really, at this point it’s obvious you don’t want to be vitamin D deficient.)