Can a heart med help hot flashes?

Ladies, if you’ve had hot flashes, chances are you’ve thought, “I wonder if nitroglycerin would help with that?” The good folks at UC San Francisco thought the same thing.

The logic is that nitroglycerin helps with chest pain by increasing blood flow, but over the long term it might “prevent or suppress the type of rapid, increased blood flow under the skin that causes sensations of heat and flushing during hot flashes.”

Alas, bad news: The women they treated with nitroglycerin patches saw some improvement briefly, but after a few months it was no better than a placebo. But hey, they tried!

GCSU gets fast track to Mercer

Good news for students at Georgia College & State University: If they’re looking to get a PharmD at Mercer, their applications will get priority reviews thanks to a transfer admission agreement between the schools.

The students will do their prereqs at GCSU, then enroll in Mercer’s PharmD program. Their first year of Mercer credits will transfer back to GCSU so they end up earning their bachelor’s degrees a year early. It’s like fuzzy math!

Reversing MS

For mice with multiple sclerosis, a big breakthrough from Johns Hopkins: “the ability to reverse — and in many cases, completely alleviate — MS-like symptoms.”

MS is caused by (to be overly simplistic) some of the body’s immune cells mistakenly attacking the myelin that protects nerve cells. What the Hopkins folks did is find a way to reduce the number of those errant cells (called effectors) in favor of “regulatory T cells, or T regs, that modulate the immune system and have been shown to prevent autoimmune reactions.”

How? By using payload-carrying microparticles injected near lymphatic tissues. (If you’ve seen the news, microparticles have a habit of getting into things — in this case it’s in a good way.) Once inside, the particles, um, do science. Result:

[I]n all of our mice, the T regs stopped the autoimmune activity of the effectors against myelin, prevented further damage to the nerves and gave them the time needed to recover.”

Oh, and 38% of the mice were completely cured. Next up: More tests!

Merck sues feds over price negotiations

Merck is suing the federal government in order to prevent it from negotiating the prices of medication.

The company’s argument: By allowing Medicare government to negotiate prices (rather than pay whatever the companies feel like charging), “[T]he law allows the government to force drugmakers to sell their property without ‘just compensation,’ which the company argues violates the Fifth Amendment.”

Yes, apparently the Constitution protects drug company profits. Who knew?

All snideness aside, it’s a nut that needs to be cracked. A transaction requires an agreement between the buyer and the seller, and forcing either one to agree to the other’s demands is either bad for taxpayers or for the pharma companies.

But unlike, say, buying a car, in this case both sides have tremendous power: pharma companies because Medicare has to buy their meds, and Medicare because it commands so much of the market. For the moment it’s up to the courts.

In related news…

States — not Georgia yet — are looking at their Medicaid budgets and starting to look at drug payments the way they look at utility and transportation payments: something the state needs to set the rates for. They’re called ‘drug price boards.’

Beyond price caps, states are considering capped co-pays, reference pricing and so-called “Netflix-model” subscription arrangements to cut the costs of prescription drugs.

Some boards have teeth, others don’t, but the message is clear: States are willing to pay fair value, but not any price, and regulation is coming. Of course, the pharma industry provided its usual measured response: “This spells disaster for patients as they could face barriers to obtaining life-saving medication.”

Tiny carriers of doom

A study of about 850,000 households found that children, far from being the sweet innocent bringers of joy, are more likely the bringers of Covid-19.

Of all households transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%.

And the smaller they were, the more typhoid and the less Mary:

Children aged 8 years and younger were more likely to be the source of transmission than those aged 9 to 17 (7.6% vs 5.8%).

But it looks good on paper

A toothless safety board that’s been handicapped from the get-go? That’s the idea behind a “National Patient Safety Board” akin to the National Transportation Safety Board, but for unsafe medical care, e.g., what can happen in a hospital.

The problem: It would require the permission and cooperation of the facilities it wants to investigate. And even if investigators were allowed in, their reports couldn’t name the facilities. Why not? As one patient advocate put it, ‘public reporting would compromise data integrity by leading hospitals to scrub records to hide bad events.’

Short Takes

Don’t self-treat those bumps

The FDA is warning people not to treat molluscum — small skin bumps also known as water warts — with anything that claims to treat it.

Do not use products that claim to treat molluscum, even if they say they are “FDA-approved” or “made in an FDA facility.” There are no FDA-approved products to treat molluscum.

Just deal with it. “Molluscum eventually goes away on its own without treatment, usually in six to 12 months.”

One shot spaying

Instead of surgery to spay kittens, researchers at Mass General Hospital have developed a single shot that effectively does it via chemistry — they use a harmless virus to deliver a gene called AMH to the kittens’ ovaries; it prevents the ovaries from creating eggs.

[T]he treated cats did not ovulate. And when they were placed in a room with a male for several hours a day over a 4-month period—an experiment repeated both 8 months and 20 months after the gene therapy—none became pregnant. Four of the females refused to mate; the other two mated but could not conceive.

The elevated AMH levels remained for at least five years, but more work will need to be done before the research is out of the preliminary stage. But if it pans out, it could make a huge difference, especially to spay-and-release programs.