March Recap 2023

For anyone who may have missed some of our March articles, below you'll find a quick summary with key takeaways from each post!

We are back with another monthly post for our paid subscribers. In this post, we also share a number of fun things that are more personal, interesting, and meant to create a closer community around RxTeach. We hope you enjoy it! If you're only interested in our free content, that's great! We will never put up a paywall for all of our posts. With that in mind, if you want to help fund some exciting research efforts, this is your chance! Reminder that all profits will be donated to help fund efforts in Alzheimer's and cancer research. We're excited about this chance to contribute to some of the research efforts that we care about most and we genuinely hope you consider contributing! There will be much more paid subscriber content coming out for those that are particularly interested and we'll still be covering our standard topics as well.

Article Recaps

Pediatric and Adolescent Obesity Guidelines:

• The American Academy of Pediatrics released the first edition of the Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents with Obesity.
• The guidance document includes that health care professionals remain a source of weight bias and need to uncover and address their own attitudes regarding children with obesity. I think this statement is so important! As health care professionals, we have to be unbiased in the treatment of our patients.
• A table of obesogenic medications and non obesogenic medications is included to aid healthcare professionals in navigating possible sources of weight gain in this population.
• Table 18 and 19 list various lifestyle and diet strategies to discuss and potentially implement for this population.

Artificial Sweetener: New Data Shows Potential Association with Heart Attack and Stroke:

• This was for paid-members only. Increase your subscription from free to paid for access to this article! All proceeds go towards Alzheimer's and cancer research.

The Obstacle is the Way - Accept the Misogi Challenge:

• Misogi or "禊" comes from Japanese culture and refers to an ancient practice of ritual purification.
• You can complete the modern "misogi challenge" by following 3 simple rules:
• There is at maximum a 50/50 chance of being successful
• You don't talk about your misogi in public
• You're not allowed to die
• The modern version of misogi is meant to challenge you!

Updates in Heart Failure:

• Dr. Kiley presented a Continuing Education presentation in January 2023 and shared his information and PowerPoint with RxTeach!
• There are two NEW classifications of heart failure aside from Reduced and Preserved Ejection Fraction. Now we can use Moderately Reduced and Improved Ejection Fraction to better classify our patients!
• Vericiguat is a new medication approved for use in the heart failure population. Vericiguat is for high risk patients with HFrEF and recent worsening of HF on guideline directed medical therapy.
• The full PowerPoint is available to our paid subscribers at the end of the post!

Do Masks Work? New Cochrane Review on Masking Efficacy:

• The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews recently published an updated review of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.
• The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. RR = 0.95 (0.84-1.09)
• In the opinion of Cochrane, an organization with a well-deserved reputation, we need to run more large RCTs before we make any definitive conclusions about the efficacy of masking in the real world.

POP QUIZ: Quick Conversions:

• This post contained 12 questions on simple unit conversions as well as basic pharmacy calculations.
• Go back to the Clinical Pharmacy tab on the home page and give yourself a confidence boost by completing our short quiz!

Things we're thinking about, consuming, or find interesting:

Kristen:

Mindsets and mantras:

• I was listening to a podcast the other day and heard something along the lines of: 'If you break your routine one day, make sure it doesn't happen two days in a row. If you allow yourself to "slip" twice in a row, you will continue to regress and it will become more and more difficult to get back to your routine.'
• I have focused on this a lot recently. If one morning I allow myself to hit snooze or sleep in, I make sure I wake up to my first alarm the next day. Or if I had an extra snack or serving of food yesterday, I pour my focus into staying on track today.
• Whatever you are working towards, don't let yourself slack two days in a row.

Recent reads: I use Goodreads if anyone is familiar! Books I read in March: