Pharmacology

Alcohol is a drug which needs no introduction given its (multi)age-old impact on humanity. One crucial question is “what makes some people crave alcohol in excess acutely ie a single sitting and/or chronically over time”? Scientists have long known that the answer involves the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain. Recently Mark Brodie, Professor of Physiology and BioPhysics at the University of Illinois at Chicago published an interesting article in the journal Neuropharmacology. His research focused on the potassium channel KCNK13 which is found inside…

Tafamidis meglumine (trade name: Vyndaqel®) was approved in November 2011 for the treatment of transthyretin amyloidosis in adults, a rare disorder ("orphan disease") caused by a defective gene and is associated with progressive nerve damage. Now it has been shown to improve survival and reduce hospitalizations for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, a rare heart condition, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2018 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tafamidis stabilizes transthyretin, preventing misfolding and the formation of amyloid. Transthyretin is…

If you want to map opioid prescription use, you can do it, right down to Congressional district. The highest rates are in the southeastern U.S., Appalachia and the rural west, all areas where there is more manual labor, according to an analysis in American Journal of Public Health. The authors believe this could help policy makers at the federal and state level better target intervention and prevention strategies, though statistics have shown prescription use is not the problem, illegal recreational use is. The data show that Alabama's Fourth Congressional District had 166 opioid…

Diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) skyrocketed in the 1990s, leading to concern that teachers wanted all kids to be automatons in classrooms and too many older parents were concerned about kids just being kids. Since then Poison Control Centers have seen a parallel surge in another problem - other kids getting into the medication. In Pediatrics, the Center for Injury Research and Policy and the Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital write that there were more than 156,000 calls to US Poison Control Centers…

Advocates are claiming medical marijuana can help to fight the opioid epidemic but data show the opposite. Rather than being at lower risk, people who use medical marijuana may be at higher risk for non-medical prescription drug use.Much of medical marijuana usage was always recreational and a new study in the Journal of Addiction Medicine finds that people who use medical marijuana have higher rates of prescription drug use - including pain relievers. Does Use of Medical Marijuana Increase or Decrease Prescription Drug Use? The researchers analyzed more than 57,000 responses to the 2015…

Though less than a dozen school children will be slain by a gun in any given year, American society is mobilized with marches and media against firearms. Meanwhile, on average 55,000 Americans will die from the flu, which has a vaccine. In states like California, anti-vaccine sentiment ran so high on the coast that the state had to pass a law forcing parents to comply or not have their kids enrolled. Some schools in Marin county had fewer than 30 percent of children vaccinated. Philosophical exemptions just by families in the wealthiest parts of California exceeded the number of religious…

When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drastically lowered the 'blood sugar' level, the HbA1C test, to 5.7 percent for a potential precursor to disease labeled "prediabetes" the rest of the world jeered. In China, that would mean 500 million people worried they have a disease. In America, it would mean 80 million more potential patients. When it came to data, less than 5 percent of those with that A1C level would ever go on to develop type 2 diabetes...in their entire lives. Advocates insisted that this would warn people to start exercising, but realists knew the truth. Many…

Though unusually ethically suspect supplement merchants have been marketing kratom, an analgesic made from the leaves of a tropical tree native to Southeast Asia, to treat opioid withdrawal symptoms, significant safety concerns exist. And it turns out kratom itself is an opioid, finds an FDA study.  A computational model developed by agency scientists,  the Public Health Assessment via Structural Evaluation (PHASE) methodology, simulates how the chemical constituents of a substance (such as the compounds/alkaloids found in kratom) are structured at a molecular level, how they may…

When pharmacy professionals — rather than doctors or nurses — take medication histories of patients in emergency departments, mistakes in drug orders can be reduced by more than 80 percent, according to a recent paper. Injuries resulting from medication use are among the most common types of inpatient injuries at U.S. hospitals, affecting hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Errors in medication histories can lead physicians to order the wrong drug, dose or frequency. Electronic health records help, but not enough, because errors that are introduced into the record by individuals…

A cannabinoid neuropathic treatment that provided pain relief in rats for a period of eleven days after the oral administration of a single dose has received a patent and signed an intellectual property license with GB Sciences, Inc.  Next up, they will work on formulations based on polymer nanoparticles with active ingredients developed by GB Sciences for the treatment of chronic pain in hopes it will be suitable for humans. The researchers Lucía Martín Banderas and Mercedes Fernández Arévalo, from the I+DNanomed research group at the University of Seville, in collaboration with…