Drug News Abstracts - July 2021


Research into Antivirals for Outpatient Treatment of COVID-19

Antiviral treatment of early COVID-19—before hospitalization—is needed to prevent progression of disease, the generation of variants, and secondary transmission of the virus. An article in Clinical Infectious Diseases discusses the current outpatient treatment landscape, outlining the difficulties in treating this disease, and describing ongoing research into antivirals.

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Risks of Discontinuing Statins in Older Patients

Older people are at risk for polypharmacy, and increasingly there have been calls for deprescribing to simplify medication regimens because of fears of negative clinical consequences, including cognitive impairment and drug-drug interactions, arising from such use. But deprescribing carries risks of its own. A population-based observational study demonstrated that when older patients who are taking numerous drugs for multiple conditions stop taking statins, they are at higher risk for heart failure or other CV events and of death compared to patients who continue statins.

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Acute Medication Overuse in Patients with Migraine

Acute medication overuse (AMO) is common in people with migraine and is associated with risk of disease progression from episodic migraine to chronic migraine. Analysis of data from the CaMEO study (Chronic Migraine Epidemiology and Outcomes) published in Neurology Clinical Practice sought to estimate the frequency of AMO and to characterize the type of medications involved.

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Sotorasib Has Anticancer Activity in NSCLC

KRAS is one of the most highly mutated genes in human cancers, found in 32% of lung adenocarcinomas. The KRASG12C variation is the most common variant in non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with a prevalence of 13%. The New England Journal of Medicine reported results from the phase 2 CodeBreak100 trial, a multicenter, single-group, open-label trial that evaluated the efficacy and safety of the highly selective irreversible KRASG12C inhibitor sotorasib in patients with KRASG12C mutated advanced NSCLC.

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