Pharmacology

If human beings go to Mars, they need food - and that means macaroni and cheese.  Currently, plastic packaging can keep food safe at room temperature for up to twelve months but a new paper in the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology could keep ready-to-eat macaroni and cheese safe and edible with nutrients for up to three years. It's proof-of-concept but they may have time to get it right, if delays and development of the James Webb Space Telescope are an indication of the glacial timescale that NASA will need to send humans back to space. In taste panels conducted by the Army, the…

A recent paper has linked two types of heart problems and one of the most commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics. Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's adverse reporting system plus a private insurance health claims database in the U.S. that captures demographics, drug identification, dose prescribed and treatment duration, identified 12,505 cases of valvular regurgitation with 125,020 case-control subjects in a random sample of more than nine million patients. It found that current users of fluoroquinolone antibiotics, such as Ciprofloxacin or Cipro, face a 2.4 times greater…

Though "medical" marijuana has long been available to much of the public, to the medical community it's been a joke. For example, over 60 percent of pain patients are older women, but the majority of medical marijuana users who got it for pain were young men. It's a nice non-specific system on a subjective scale so it became an easy route to get legal access to a drug. And it is a drug, it does things to receptors, but what they are really accomplishing is unclear. Some of the reason marijuana hasn't been better studied is because it's a Kafka-type headache to get government approval to study…

Though Johnson  &  Johnson and Purdue Pharma are on the hook for big judgments due to their marketing practices related to opioids, claims that they "created" an opioid epidemic are the scientific equivalent of fat shaming people if you don't like Burger King commercials. Attorneys will claim it, they will get thousands of people to sign up as litigants, and juries will agree with the emotional arguments they hear, but that has nothing to do with science or health. In appeals cases, science data is used, which is why so many spectacularly ridiculous judgments (like baby powder…

If marijuana has analgesic properties, people will try it to potentially manage their pain, but it is unclear if it does or not. Fortunately, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration signaled it is expanding its marijuana research program will draft guidelines for producing the drug for scientific and medical research.  Until there are science answers it is people trying all of the above, and that creates confounders for other kinds of research. A new study says adults who take prescription opioids for severe pain are more likely to have increased anxiety, depression and substance…

Increased consumption of omega 3 fats is widely promoted because of a recent belief that it will protect against, or even reverse, conditions such as type 2 diabetes.  Fads always start with a kernel of scientific truth, as happened with acai berries, chocolate, red wine, and whatever probiotic or yogurt is being for the microbiome sold this week. Omega 3 is a type of fat and small amounts are essential for good health and can be found in the food that we eat. But a systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization and published today in the British Medical Journal finds…

A few years ago, a study by the British Cheese Board queried 200 volunteers on whether or not they had nightmares after eating cheese prior to bedtime. Nary a one did.  Why would they ask such a thing? Apparently it is folklore in England that if you eat cheese before bedtime, you will be restless. There may be something to it, though evidence is sketchy. Some swear by warm milk, for example, but there is better evidence that eating or drinking nothing at night, except water, will not only help you sleep better, you will lose weight. Our modern diet has us snacking and enjoying all kinds…

Fibromyalgia is an ill-defined chronic pain condition and claims around the gut microbiome are the latest craze in science-y sounding speculation about lots of health issues, following the fad of linking everything to what your grandparents ate at dinner, epigenetics. While in severe cases, microbiota are obviously important, last week the FDA warned the public about fecal transplants when a person died. The agency suspended clinical trials. Chronic pain sufferers who can't get a specific diagnosis have dealt with woo promises from corporate marketing for a lot longer. A new paper links the…

In a small pilot study consume who consumed a natural dietary supplement called nicotinomide riboside (NR) daily showed signs of mimicking caloric restriction, which in mice has been linked to health benefits. Caloric restriction is a starvation diet. When lower level organisms such as fruit flies, roundworms, rodents are raised on such a diet from birth, slashing of caloric intake by about a third has health benefits and, in some cases, extended lifespan. No humans have done that, it would be a human rights violation to wean a baby on a starvation diet, and claims about benefits in adults…

There are only four seasons so one of them is going to win when it comes to drug use, and it's little surprise that season for teenagers is summer,when kids are not in school. A recent analysis of survey results found that 34 percent of new LSD initiates first used the drug in the summer. In addition, 30 percent of marijuana, 30 percent of ecstasy (MDMA/Molly), and 28 percent of cocaine use was found to begin in summer months. Since summer is 25 percent of the seasons this is not really compelling insight, but if epidemiologists want to get National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences…