2- Tuesday Pharmacy Practice News – 12th October

 1 – COVID-19 May Be More Deadly for Individuals with Type 2 Diabetes

• COVID-19 could be more deadly for some individuals with diabetes than others, results of a new study presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes show.
• According to several studies, patients with diabetic kidney disease have a chronic pro-inflammatory state and immune dysregulation, making it difficult to ‘fight off’ the virus compared to someone who has a properly working immune system.
• The study results show that individuals with type 2 diabetes were 2.5 more times likely to die within 7 days of admission to the hospital than individuals with type 1 diabetes.

Source: Pharmacy Times

2 – Steroid Nasal Sprays Can Lessen the Development of Severe COVID-19 Infections

• Individuals who regularly use steroid nasal sprays are less likely to develop a severe COVID-19 infection, the results of a Cleveland Clinic study show.
• In the study, investigators included 72,147 COVID-19-positive individuals, aged 18 years and older, within the Cleveland Clinic health system from the beginning of April 2020 to the end of March 2021.
• Individuals who used an intranasal corticosteroid, which are nasal sprays in the steroid family, prior to COVID-19 were 22% less likely to be hospitalized, 23% less likely to be admitted to the ICU, and 24% less likely to die from COVID-19 during hospitalization than individuals who did not use a steroid nasal spray.
• Of these individuals, 17.5% were hospitalized, 4.1% were admitted to the ICU, and 2.6% died during hospitalization. Additionally, 14.1% of individuals received a steroid nasal spray prior to the COVID-19 infection.

Source: Pharmacy Times

3 – FDA Grants Priority Review for Cabotegravir to Prevent HIV

• The FDA has accepted and granted priority review for a new drug application (NDA) for cabotegravir from ViiV Healthcare, an injectable for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), ViiV Healthcare’s parent company GlaxoSmithKline said in a statement.
• The FDA’s priority review designation of cabotegravir long-acting for PrEP underscores the importance of this medicine, supported by the results of the [HIV Prevention Trial Network] studies, which demonstrated cabotegravir’s superior efficacy over daily oral [tenofovir disoproxil fumarate with emtricitabine(TDF/FDC)] tablets.
• If approved, this drug would be the first, long-acting therapy to prevent HIV for individuals at risk of infection, who have a negative HIV-1 test.

Source: Pharmacy Times

4- Study: Most Blood Cancer Patients Could Benefit From Additional Dose of COVID-19 Vaccine

• More than half of patients with B-cell blood cancers produced an antibody response to a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to research from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS).
• In addition to these findings, the study showed that patients who had detectable antibodies after the 2 primary vaccine doses had increased levels following a third dose.
• According to a press release, LLS recommends that patients with blood cancer who received 2 doses of either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine receive an additional dose according to CDC guidance.
• Further guidance will be coming soon for individuals who received Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Source: Pharmacy Times

5 – CovRNN—A recurrent neural network model for predicting outcomes of COVID-19 patients: model development and validation using EHR data

• Predicting outcomes of COVID-19 patients at an early stage is critical for optimized clinical care and resource management, especially during a pandemic.
• Although multiple machine learning models have been proposed to address this issue, based on the need for extensive data pre-processing and feature engineering, these models have not been validated or implemented outside of the original study site.
• Trained on a large heterogeneous real-world dataset, the CovRNN model showed high prediction accuracy, good calibration, and transferability through consistently good performance on multiple external datasets.
• The results demonstrate the feasibility of a COVID-19 predictive model that delivers high accuracy without the need for complex feature engineering.

Source: MedRxiv

6 – A Data-Driven Framework for Identifying Intensive Care Unit Admissions Colonized with Multidrug-Resistant Organisms

• The rising prevalence of multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs), such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE), and Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), is an increasing concern in healthcare settings.
• Leveraging electronic healthcare record data, they developed a data-driven framework to predict MRSA, VRE, and CRE colonization upon intensive care unit admission (ICU), and identify the associated socio-demographic and clinical factors using logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), and XGBoost algorithms.
• They performed threshold optimization for converting predicted probabilities into binary predictions and identified the cut-off maximizing the sum of sensitivity and specificity.
• This data-driven modeling framework can be used as a clinical decision support tool for timely predictions, identification of high-risk patients, and selective and timely use of infection control measures in ICUs.

Source: MedRxiv

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