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This week, The Pharmaceutical Journal has highlighted the rising cost of prescriptions and polypharmacy in care homes; reported on the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)’s approval of oral Wegovy (semaglutide; Novo Nordisk) and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)’s approvals of seladelpar for primary biliary cholangitis and atogepant for use during migraine attack; while also reporting on research that found drugs used for airway clearance in critically ill patients actually cause harm.
News has also included an expanded role for community pharmacies in flu and meningitis vaccinations in England, and a call to expand the role of pharmacies in Scotland.
We’ve also published an interview with Kathie Cashell, the new chief executive of the General Pharmaceutical Council and reported on the regulator’s response to the Mann review.
Read on for more health news you might have missed this week.
Phase II trials for elecoglipron and detailed results for retatrutide
In phase II trials published in The Lancet, elecoglipron — AstraZeneca’s GLP-1 pill — showed clinically meaningful weight loss in people with and without diabetes mellitus, and glucose lowering in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Average weight reductions reached up to 10.5% at 26 weeks and 11.8% at 36 weeks in the highest-dose groups of adults without diabetes. In adults with T2DM, elecoglipron reduced HbA1c by up to 1.88 percentage points and produced average weight loss of 7.7% at 26 weeks.
Eli Lilly and Company has presented detailed results from two pivotal phase III trials of retatrutide at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 86th Scientific Sessions, with results relating to people with T2DM simultaneously published in The Lancet.
Further reading:
E. coli infections becoming more resistant to antibiotics
Shiga-producing Escherichia coli infections in the United States are becoming more resistant to antibiotics, study results published in Future Microbiology have revealed.
“Even though we don’t usually treat this infection with antibiotics, we’re still seeing resistance emerging and spreading, which tells us these bacteria are being exposed to antibiotics somewhere along the way,” study leader Csaba Varga, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said.
“Better antibiotic stewardship in agriculture, along with food safety and environmental controls, will be key to slowing this trend. What happens on farms, in food production and in the environment can directly impact human health. Prevention has to happen from farm to fork,” he added.
Further reading:
High blood pressure may be associated with lower dementia risk
For people with physical frailty, having high blood pressure may be associated with a lower risk of dementia, according to a study published in Neurology.
“While high blood pressure is still a concern for the majority of people, we may need to look at people’s overall health and whether they are showing signs of frailty as we consider how to manage their blood pressure,” said study author Jason R Smith, of the University of North Carolina.
Another study published in The Lancet Primary Care (n=2,614,330) revealed that all subgroups of patients with antihypertensive prescriptions had increased risk of hospitalisation or death owing to falls versus those who were unexposed (7.1% vs. 3.8%), although the absolute risk of falls was low in all groups (≤12 events per 10,000 patients/year).
Further reading:
Alkaline drinks could weaken medication coating
Drinking mineral or medicinal water with medicines could cause premature release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient, if they have a high alkaline content that weakens the enteric coating of medications. But more acidic liquids, such as apple juice, caused less damage to the enteric coating of the medications, a study published in Pharmaceutics has suggested.
