ADHD med errors skyrocket

A lot of kids take ADHD meds — 5% by current estimates. Apparently they’re not always careful about taking them, as ADHD medication errors have jumped 300% (!) since 2000. These aren’t doctor or pharmacist errors — these are patient/caregiver errors.

Based on data from poison control centers, researchers from Ohio’s Nationwide Children’s Hospital found the most common scenarios:

• 54% – “Inadvertently taken/given medication twice”
• 13% – “Inadvertently taken/given someone else’s medication”
• 13% – “Wrong medication taken/given”

Of those cases, more than 4% “were associated with a serious medical outcome.” Yikes.

Prize-winning nose hair research

A hearty GPhA Buzz congratulations to the team of UC Irvine researchers who won the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for their paper, “The Quantification and Measurement of Nasal Hairs in a Cadaveric Population,” (paywall link here) i.e., “using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.”

The cause of (and cure for?) preeclampsia

Preeclampsia is common enough that you’d think we’d know what causes it — but nope. That might have changed, though, thanks to researchers at Western and Brown universities. The Canadian/US team has found a “troublemaker” protein called cis P-tau that it thinks is “a central circulating driver of preeclampsia.”

One of the team had already been testing an antibody for cis P-tau (which also happens to be associated with Alzheimer’s), so they figured to try it on mice with preeclampsia. Good news: “[W]e found the cis P-tau antibody efficiently depleted the toxic protein in the blood and placenta, and corrected all features associated with preeclampsia in mice.”

In other words, they found the cause and already have a potential treatment in the works.

Check the dates on your omega-3s

Here’s a disturbing finding: Not only are a lot of omega-3 supplements being sold past their expiration dates, but — according to George Washington University researchers — something like 45% of them have gone rancid.

The researchers conducted six years of tests on 72 of the most popular brands of omega-3 supplements, using the recommended rancidity limits that are voluntarily set by GOED, a global trade group that represents omega-3 manufacturers. […] The researchers found a total of 45% of flavored and unflavored supplements tested positive for rancidity….

The good (or bad) news is that the flavoring used in some of the pills might cover the unpleasant odor.

Flipping the vax for autoimmune disease

Here’s an interesting idea for treating autoimmune diseases: Rather than try to keep the immune system in check, tag healthy cells as “Do not kill.” University of Chicago bioengineers call it an “inverse vaccine.”

The liver already does the ‘tag-as-friendly’ trick with aging cells. After all, why have the body attack something that’s gonna die anyway? So the UC folks took this idea and ran with it. They created a molecule that looks a lot like a bit of an aged cell — one the liver wouldn’t bother sending the troops for. By attaching this molecule to myelin (which the immune system attacks in diseases like multiple sclerosis) they were able to keep the nerve cells safe.

The immune system, they found, stopped attacking myelin, allowing nerves to function correctly again and reversing symptoms of disease in animals.

Captain Obvious feels your pain

“The pandemic a tough time also for pharmacies”

Customers showing up even when they were sick, not agreeing with the restrictions, and many new tasks for staff….

The Long Read: Putting the “Meh” in Medicaid Expansion edition

Medicaid expansion was once a hugely divisive topic. These days, though, with 40 states — red and blue — having expanded the program with bipartisan support, it’s just not that big a deal any more.