A budget-busting 3.6 million Medicare recipients could now be eligible for coverage of the weight-loss drug Wegovy, a new KFF analysis says. That’s because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Wegovy (semaglutide) to reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke in certain patients, the study says. The FDA’s ruling potentially allows Wegovy prescription coverage for more than a quarter of 13.7 million Medicare patients who’ve been diagnosed with obesity or excess weight, KFF says. Those 3.6 million people — about 7% of all beneficiaries — have established heart disease as well as excess weight, and thus could be eligible for coverage of Wegovy. However, KFF notes that among this group 1.9 million also have diabetes and therefore are already eligible for coverage of weight-loss drugs like Wegovy or Zepbound. “Although Wegovy already had FDA approval as an anti-obesity medication, Medicare is prohibited by law from covering drugs when prescribed for obesity,” KFF said in a news release. How the FDA’s change affects Medicare spending will depend in part on how many Part D plans add coverage for Wegovy, and the extent to which plans will restrict coverage, researchers said. Assuming just 10% of eligible Medicare patients use Wegovy in a given year, and assuming a 50% rebate on the list price, the program would still incur nearly $3 billion…  read on >  read on >

Want to prevent a respiratory infection? A fingerful of Neosporin antibiotic swabbed inside your nose might help you fight off a range of invading respiratory viruses, a new study claims. Lab animals whose noses were treated using neomycin — the main ingredient in over-the-counter Neosporin ointment — mounted a robust immune defense against both the COVID virus and a highly virulent strain of influenza, researchers found. The same nasal approach also appeared to work in humans, this time with Neosporin itself. The ointment triggered a swift immune response from genes in the human nose that serve as a first line of defense against invading viruses, researchers reported April 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is an exciting finding, that a cheap over-the-counter antibiotic ointment can stimulate the human body to activate an antiviral response,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology and dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn. Neosporin contains neomycin, bacitracin and polymyxin B, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Medicine. The COVID-19 virus has infected more than 774 million people and killed nearly 7 million, researchers said in background notes. Meanwhile, flu viruses cause up to 5 million cases of severe disease and a half-million deaths annually. Against these threats, humans deploy treatments that are typically taken orally or intravenously, researchers said. These…  read on >  read on >

An early marker of multiple sclerosis could help doctors figure out who will eventually fall prey to the degenerative nerve disease, a new study says. In one in 10 cases of MS, the body begins producing a distinctive set of antibodies in the blood years before symptoms start appearing, researchers reported April 19 in the journal Nature Medicine. This antibody pattern was 100% predictive of an MS diagnosis, researchers found. Every patient who carried this set of antibodies went on to develop MS. Researchers hope these antibodies will someday form the basis of a simple blood test to screen for MS. “Over the last few decades, there’s been a move in the field to treat MS earlier and more aggressively with newer, more potent therapies,” said senior researcher Dr. Michael Wilson, a neurologist with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “A diagnostic result like this makes such early intervention more likely, giving patients hope for a better life,” Wilson added in a news release. MS occurs when the body’s own immune system attacks the central nervous system, damaging the protective sheath around nerve fibers called myelin. This disrupts signals to and from the brain, causing a variety of symptoms that impede the senses and impact the ability to move. An autoimmune disease like MS is believed to result in part from rare immune reactions…  read on >  read on >

Jobs that challenge your mind could help your brain age more gracefully, a new study suggests. The harder your brain works on the job, the less likely you are to have memory and thinking problems later in life, researchers reported April 17 in the journal Neurology. “We examined the demands of various jobs and found that cognitive stimulation at work during different stages in life — during your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s — was linked to a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment after the age of 70,” said researcher Dr. Trine Holt Edwin, of Oslo University Hospital in Norway. For the study, researchers analyzed data on 7,000 people in 305 occupations across Norway. Researchers measured the degree to which each job taxed the brain and the body, based on the different skill sets required for the work. They then divided the study subjects into four groups, based on their work routine and whether the job required more manual skill or brain power. Teaching wound up being the most common job with the highest demands on a person’s brain, while mail carriers and janitors had the most common jobs with the least demands on brain skills. After age 70, participants completed memory and thinking tests to judge how well their brain was aging. About 42% of people with jobs involving little brain work had…  read on >  read on >

Antipsychotics can substantially increase dementia patients’ risk of many serious health problems, a new study warns. Dementia patients prescribed antipsychotics have increased risk of stroke, blood clots, heart attack, heart failure, bone fractures, pneumonia and kidney damage, researchers reported April 17 in the BMJ. “A move away from the overprescription of antipsychotics is overdue,” concluded the research team led by Pearl Mok, a research fellow with the University of Manchester in England. The study adds impetus to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services into the overuse of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes. The investigation, announced last year, was launched in response to reports that some nursing homes might be falsely labeling patients as schizophrenic so they can be given antipsychotic drugs. For the new study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 174,000 people in England diagnosed with dementia between January 1988 and May 2018, at an average age of 82. More than 35,500 of those dementia patients had been prescribed an antipsychotic, and their health profiles were compared against up to 15 randomly selected patients who hadn’t used an antipsychotic. Antipsychotic use more than doubled the risk of pneumonia among dementia patients, researchers found. About 4.5% of dementia patients on antipsychotic drugs wound up developing pneumonia within three months of starting the meds, versus 1.5%  of non-users. The drugs were also…  read on >  read on >

Zepbound, one of the wildly popular weight-loss drugs that millions of Americans now take, eased sleep apnea in obese adults in two company trials, drug maker Eli Lilly announced Wednesday. First approved to treat obesity by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last November, Zepbound’s power was significant: It reduced sleep apnea severity by nearly two-thirds in patients. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) “impacts 80 million adults in the U.S., with more than 20 million living with moderate-to-severe OSA. However, 85% of OSA cases go undiagnosed and therefore untreated,” Dr. Jeff Emmick, senior vice president of product development at Lilly, said in a company news release announcing the results. “Addressing this unmet need head-on is critical, and while there are pharmaceutical treatments for the excessive sleepiness associated with OSA, tirzepatide [Zepbound] has the potential to be the first pharmaceutical treatment for the underlying disease,” he added. Importantly, the results have not yet been published in a medical journal. In the two studies, researchers looked at whether Zepbound worked better than a placebo in reducing how many times per hour, on average, a person partly or fully stopped breathing while sleeping. In the first study, sleep apnea patients did not use CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines, which blow air into the airway to keep it from collapsing during sleep. Patients in the second study did use the machines. After 52 weeks, Zepbound…  read on >  read on >