What Viagra Can Teach Us About Covid Drug Finding: DR MICHAEL MOSLEY

The threat of Covid-19 has led people to do some crazy things, but with the idea of ​​injecting bleach into your body, one of the craziest things I’ve seen is the self-medication with a drug normally used to treat parasites in horses, chickens and cattle.

Sales of ivermectin – a drug also used topically in humans for lice (that is, you rub it on your scalp, you don’t drink it) – have skyrocketed in the United States and Australia, thanks to a widespread rumor that it is a safe and effective treatment. for Covid.

These rumors were fueled by an Egyptian study which claimed that hospital deaths of Covid patients fell by 90% when ivermectin was used. The study has since been withdrawn due to “ethical concerns,” but that hasn’t stopped the frenzy.

The US drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, has warned that at high doses (the kind vets use) the drug can be toxic – as it said in one of its strangest warnings : “You are not a horse, you are not a cow. Seriously, all of you. Stop it. ‘

There are new trials on ivermectin, including the University of Oxford’s PRINCIPE trial, which is looking for home treatments, and it could prove to be as effective as social media experts claim, although I doubt. In the meantime, I definitely advise against self-medication.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with seeing whether a drug developed for one purpose could be used for something entirely different – known as “reuse”. This is how some of our most successful treatments came to be.

Years ago, when I was doing a modern drug research television series, I watched life-saving drugs that started with a different purpose.

Chemotherapy drugs, for example, came from the poison gas attacks of World War I. During World War II, fearing that the Germans would use poison gas against Allied troops, two doctors from Yale University in the United States were asked to study mustard gas for an antidote.

Instead of an antidote, what they found was something far more surprising: Doctors who had treated soldiers exposed to mustard gas during World War I noted that it killed many of their white blood cells, some important to our immune system.

Doctors at Yale realized that mustard gas could help patients with lymphoma, a cancer where the body begins to make large numbers of abnormal white blood cells. They were right: mustard gas binds to the DNA of cancer cells, which then self-destruct.

The chemotherapy drugs that followed – and are used today – have the same basic mechanism: they are cytotoxic, toxic to dividing cells.

Because cancer cells divide faster than healthy cells, they are poisoned more quickly.

A more recent example of a reused drug is Viagra, which began as a treatment for angina pectoris, but trial participants at Morriston Hospital in Swansea reported an unexpected side effect: erections.

So, in a desperate situation, with people dying in Covid hospital, it’s pretty reasonable to see if drugs such as ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine (an antimalarial drug also widely touted as a Covid treatment) could help. .

But you have to conduct proper clinical trials, not to swallow a lot of people because of a social media post. Indeed, alongside the creation of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, clinical trials that quickly tell us whether a reused drug is helping or not has been one of the UK’s great scientific contributions to the current crisis.

The advantage of using a drug that’s already licensed for something else is that it doesn’t have to go through all the safety testing, which can take years and cost huge amounts of money.

The RECOVERY trial is a particularly important example, of which we should be proud, because it has already saved millions of lives. It was set up in the UK in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, to research which treatments are effective against Covid19. Many of the drugs reviewed were reused.

Searches that would normally take years are reduced to months. Once a drug is proven to be safe and effective, doctors can use it with confidence, knowing that it will actually help.

So far, more than 42,000 patients, recruited from 186 NHS hospitals, have participated, with amazing results. The RECOVERY trial was the first to show that an inexpensive steroid, dexamethasone, normally used to treat allergies and skin conditions, can reduce a patient’s risk of death by more than a third if they is on a ventilator.

The trial also convincingly showed that taking hydroxychloroquine does not help and may even be harmful, hospitalized patients who receive it die in slightly higher numbers: high-dose aspirin and convalescent plasma (blood drawn on donors who have had Covid and who contain a lot of antibodies) were also found not to help.

Among the drugs they are studying is baricitinib, which normally treats rheumatoid arthritis.

Separately, we may also soon find out whether melatonin, widely used to treat insomnia, can also help Covid patients. There was some excitement over a small study in the journal Open Heart that showed that patients who took melatonin were less likely to die in hospital.

But before you search for it online, be aware that while melatonin has anti-inflammatory properties, these results could be due to chance.

One thing Covid has revealed is a growing gap between people who trust science from rigorous trials and people who prefer to rely on the advice of anti-vaccines or social media influencers. I know who I would trust.

This is proof that effective treatments are found in very surprising places, but we MUST wait for the proof before using it.

The growing gap between the performance of boys and girls in GCSEs and A-levels is disappointing.

Of course, girls’ results are worth celebrating, but what can be done to help boys? A recent study suggests a new approach: increasing their levels of “good” bacteria as infants.

Canadian scientists have followed thousands of babies since 2009 and found that boys with the highest levels of gut bacteria Bacteroidetes at age one had more advanced cognitive and language skills by age two. .

Tthis was only true for boys (although girls also tend to have higher levels, so maybe they already had sufficient amounts).

Bacteroidetes produce sphingolipids, which nourish nerve cells in a growing brain. Levels can be increased by breastfeeding infants, eating a diet high in fiber, and exposure to nature.

Why lack of sleep makes you want cookies

I dream a lot, but lately the themes have largely been related to stress – for example, I drive too fast on a narrow road with a steep incline to my left (which I inevitably dive into), or I try to arrive somewhere and be infinitely frustrated by the missing trains.

I am telling you this, despite knowing that other people’s dreams are boring, as new research suggests that important things are happening in our brains while we are dreaming.

We already know that dreams play a crucial role in processing our emotions, and now it seems that they seem to help refine our hunger as well.

The majority of dreams occur during the REM phase of sleep (rapid eye movement), when we are almost completely paralyzed and move little, except for your eyes which move side to side (i.e. is why it is called REM).

This is probably to keep us from struggling while we are in the throes of a particularly intense dramatic dream.

Dreaming is a bit like free psychotherapy, where you revisit unpleasant memories and events from the past day, but stay calm. It allows you to process and defuse your emotions.

If you deprive people of REM sleep, they become more and more irritable. They are also hungry and thirsty for cookies.

This could be due to a recently identified circuit in the brain that is particularly active in REM sleep.

Studies in mice have shown that by altering the activity of this circuit, mice eat more, suggesting that REM sleep plays an important role in controlling hunger. Another reason to get a good night’s sleep and enjoy those dreams!