I hope this newsletter finds you and your family well. It's Summerfest time and I hope you are enjoying our summer(ish) weather. It's always great to be active outside this time of year. 

The first article this month looks at a very common medication class, one that generates over $13 billion in income for pharmaceutical companies. Proton pump inhibitors (PPI) are commonly used by many people for heartburn and some are now over-the-counter. This study looked at over 1.8 million records and found a disturbing risk for people taking these medications. If you are taking one of these medications, it is worth a read. 

Survival rates for cardiac arrest outside the hospital are generally, quite low. However, there is a 'new' type of CPR that has been shown to double the rate of survival. The best part, you can learn it in about 2 minutes. If you don't already know CPR, I hope you will give this a look. 

Finally, as the father to a couple of teenagers, social media is everywhere. How many 'followers' people have on Twitter or Instagram are sources of pride for some. However, when do people cross the line and just get annoying? This study found that most of us may not know when we cross that line. 

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Proton pump inhibitors increase incidence 

 

Summary of findings:

• Background and Aims: Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) have been associated with adverse clinical outcomes amongst clopidogrel users after an acute coronary syndrome. Recent pre-clinical results suggest that this risk might extend to subjects without any prior history of cardiovascular disease. We explore this potential risk in the general population via data-mining approaches. 

• Methods: Using a novel approach for mining clinical data for pharmacovigilance, we queried over 16 million clinical documents on 2.9 million individuals to examine whether PPI usage was associated with cardiovascular risk in the general population.
• Results: In multiple data sources, we found gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) patients exposed to PPIs to have a 1.16 fold increased association (95% CI 1.09-1.24) with myocardial infarction (MI). Survival analysis in a prospective cohort found a two-fold (HR = 2.00; 95% CI 1.07-3.78; P = 0.031) increase in association with cardiovascular mortality. We found that this association exists regardless of clopidogrel use. We also found that H2 blockers, an alternate treatment for GERD, were not associated with increased cardiovascular risk; had they been in place, such pharmacovigilance algorithms could have flagged this risk as early as the year 2000.
• Conclusions: Consistent with our pre-clinical findings that PPIs may adversely impact vascular function, our data-mining study supports the association of PPI exposure with risk for MI in the general population. These data provide an example of how a combination of experimental studies and data-mining approaches can be applied to prioritize drug safety signals for further investigation.

 

Self-promotional behavior gets annoying

Summary of findings:  

• People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one's positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiments 1 and 2). Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likable and as braggarts (Experiment 3).