Dangers of hypertension drugs

Blood pressure meds can double the risk of fractures in nursing home patients. Yeah, double. It’s due to balance issues; standing up can cause a BP drop and enough dizziness to lead to a fall. And once a senior has a serious bone fracture, it’s often a “downward spiral” after that.

This comes out of a Rutgers study of the health records of 30,000 elderly patients in long-term care facilities from 2006 to 2019 to compare their fractures with the drugs they were taking.

It’s even worse for some patients:

Patients with dementia, systolic blood pressure above 139, diastolic blood pressure above 79, or no recent use of blood pressure medication all experienced at least triple the fracture risk of unmedicated patients.

Getting ahead of the next coronavirus

Why wait for the next coronavirus to appear before creating a vaccine? Apparently, that’s what Cambridge researchers were thinking, so they’ve developed a vaccine they say works against a wide variety of them.

It’s pretty simple, actually (well, the idea is): They’ve found regions that appear in a lot of coronaviruses and targeted those, rather than trying to match a specific one. They “trained” it on eight different viruses, and apparently that was enough to make it work against viruses it wasn’t trained on, “including ones that haven’t even been identified yet.”

Said the senior author:

“We don’t have to wait for new coronaviruses to emerge. We know enough about coronaviruses, and different immune responses to them, that we can get going with building protective vaccines against unknown coronaviruses now.”

Masks were overwhelmed by Omicron

When the original Covid-19 started to spread, masks protected a lot of people and probably saved a lot of lives. But here’s a surprise: British researchers figured out that masks made a lot less of a difference once the Omicron BA.2 variant became dominant.

Why? Omicron was so much more transmissible that, statistically, wearing a mask was overwhelmed by other risk factors. (Analogy: A padded dashboard may have saved lives when cars travelled at 15 mph, but by the time they were moving at 65 or 70, seat belts and air bags made much more of a difference.)

Low T, shorter life?

It used to be thought that having higher levels of testosterone could lead to shorter lives for men — that was based on studies of eunuchs^* and neutered animals. And then there’s the fact that women generally live longer than men.

But a new Aussie study (a meta-analysis, actually) found that the opposite seems to be true. Men with lower T tended to die sooner.

But wait, there’s more.

A lot of those early-dying men had heart disease, and “the same process underlying heart disease might also contribute to erectile dysfunction.” So ED might not be due to lower testosterone directly, but to heart issues. And that leads to the question, is low testosterone causing heart disease or is it caused by it?

Regardless, the message “Keep your T levels healthy” remains.

^* Historical ones in Korea — there probably aren’t many around today

Short takes

Yes, please use sunscreen

No, sunscreen won’t stop you from getting enough vitamin D, no matter what “experts” on social media claim. Even if it did, you can always take a supplement — melanoma is a much bigger concern.

Tampon news

There’s apparently a lot going on in the tampon market, thanks in part to the rise of women’s sports. There are some legit products, but also some products of … let’s just say questionable utility.

Store-brand naloxone

Walgreens is launching its own generic, over-the-counter naloxone nasal spray. It’s currently available online for $34.99 for a pack of two 4-mg doses — 10 bucks less than the Narcan brand — and should be on shelves by the end of May.

Alzheimer’s twist

Current understanding: Your genetics can increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

New idea: For some patients at least, genetics can cause it, period. That means a test could determine years or decades in advance whether someone would develop it.

A new study out of Spain found that up to 1 in 5 Alzheimer’s patients has two copies of a gene variant called APOE4. Almost every one of them eventually developed Alzheimer’s or its markers, “and the authors say that two copies of APOE4 should now be considered a cause of Alzheimer’s — not simply a risk factor.”

By age 55, over 95 percent had biological markers associated with the disease. By 65, almost all had abnormal levels of a protein called amyloid that forms plaques in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. And many started developing symptoms of cognitive decline at age 65, younger than most people without the APOE4 variant.

Questions still to be answered: Does this hold true across ethnicities? Could gene editing (looking at you, CRISPR) prevent it? You know the drill: More research is needed.

Warm proteins are different proteins

Drug design often relies on the shapes of various proteins. (You probably know this.) Researchers cool them to make them stable, then [insert science here] to see how various chemicals will react.

Well it turns out — shockingly — that cooling or freezing those proteins changes their shapes; they can be very different when they’re at 98.6°. So testing drug candidates on cold proteins might not reflect how they’ll behave in the body.

Scientists at Michigan’s Van Andel Institute not only figured this out, they also developed a method to study those proteins: They heat ’em to body temperature, then flash-freeze them — that preserves the shape so they can study it properly. And having an image of the body-temp protein is critical, especially with AI doing more and more of the work finding chemical matches.

The Van Andel folks did this with one protein, but they expect that publishing the method will allow other researchers to have more A-ha! moments.