Letter From The Editor

Medication persistence gets a lot of attention these days, as we all have seen patients discontinue or miss doses of chronic medications. Sometimes it is the pill burden, and for others it is the multiple copays for all the medications they get from the pharmacy. If you add the burden …

Last week I was watching an episode of the show New Amsterdam and they had an ER patient who was in DKA because they couldn’t afford their insulin. The medical director made a big deal and said they would make their own. The first thing that came to my mind …

We have covered a lot of articles featuring the use of intermittent fasting. The term gets used in many ways and makes no distinction between only eating for a limited time every day or alternating days of no eating with eating. For a lot of patients, the every other day …

I have been working with a group of residents at a local hospital going over insulin dosing: 9 residents answering 10 dosing questions each. The wrong dose was given 65% of the time and 1/2 of those would have caused harm to the patient. Now Novo has put together an …

I am at the NCPA meeting in San Diego this weekend, and while I was on the plane I was rereading The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss. In one section of the book he talks about the slow carb diet and delves into how reducing carbs can actually reverse hypertension …

It has been a dozen years since Dr. Steven Nissen took direct aim at pioglitazone and rosiglitazone, based on his interpretation of cardiac risk factors. The FDA rushed to put severe restriction on their usage and finally in 2010 rosiglitazone, also known as Avandia, was withdrawn from the market. Pioglitazone …

It has been over 6 years since the FDA approved Invokana as the first SGLT-2 inhibitor for the treatment of diabetes. When it was introduced there was a cautious optimism based on the tremendous amount of press concerning the fear of urinary tract infections. Usage was slow at first but …

Our former intern, Amber Satz, PharmD Candidate, LECOM School of Pharmacy, was reviewing some info on GLP-1 Analogs and came across a new entry into the class. Efpeglenatide is a new weekly analog from Sanofi. It appears to be as effective as all other weekly’s out there, and it will …

On the Doximity website there has been a lot of chatter amongst medical professionals on the idea of a once daily “super pill” for everyone, to prevent diabetes and CVD. The combination for this pill often changes, but an ACE-I and a statin seem to always be in the mix. …

Usif Darwish, PharmD Candidate, Florida A&M University, College of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, has been looking at the use of natural products and vitamins to improve diabetes care. This week he has a special feature from the International Journal of Endocrinology that looks at how vitamin D works and how …