One of the favorite games of big Pharma is what I call the “me too” drugs.
Me too drugs work this way.
A drug comes out from big Pharma company A, and now BNC has to come out with a competing drug, the “me too” drug.
They may or may not be any better or worse; usually, they are about the same. But they do confuse the issue for doctors, and as a result, doctors often lose sight of the mechanism of the drugs, and will simply prescribe the one with the best salesperson,
where the prettiest drug company rep wins the business.
Another game that big Pharma plays is to come out with a new mechanism for a new drug.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, except that the drug company will then claim that the new mechanism and the new drug is better. And that the doctor should not be prescribing the old drug.
Eventually, it becomes almost malpractice to prescribe the old, proven drug.
And yet, the old drug is proven safe for decades, and so it’s off patent. You can buy it very cheaply. There’s very little profit in making it.
So the drug companies offer every incentive to speak poorly of the old drug, and to claim the new drug is better.
We have a bias that new is better…
Everybody feels a new drug is better than the old drug. And so the new drug will get prescribed, but unfortunately, the drug company testing did not have to show anything long-term regarding safety.
A phase 3 clinical trial will be one year long.
And it will test the drug with people that are on eight or ten other drugs.
So you the patient are the guinea pig. And ten years or twenty years from now, when it’s found that the new drug is terrible, you’ve been taking it all this time. And maybe you have some complications from it, or maybe there are people with cancer from the drug or other complications.
So it is with heartburn medications. Whether you call it heartburn, acid reflux, or GERD, these are very widely prescribed and taken drugs.
The first-generation drugs were antihistamines.
They were used since the 1950s and were very safe. Some of them have amazing properties that are being exploited for mental health, or for healing tumors, and for restoring the body’s hormone balance. These drugs include cimetidine and famotidine. Tagamet would be the best known, and you can still buy famotidine as Pepcid, over the counter.
In another newsletter, I’ll explain how Pepcid can be used for many health problems, except for girder heartburn ironically, where it’s pretty useless.
In any event, to continue our story, the drug companies came out with the second generation, the new mechanism, these are the protein pump inhibitors. Protein pump inhibitors vastly lower the amount of stomach acid, and actually, this causes a lot of huge problems in the body.
However to get these drugs approved, the drug companies prove that they reduced stomach acid, the “surrogate endpoint”. Nobody tested this drug for 10, 20, or 30 years.
Except for the patients taking it, that is.
So now it’s very clear that people taking protein pump inhibitors are a much higher risk for beta-amyloid plaque in the brain which is thought to be associated with or even causing Alzheimer’s disease.
These are some of the proton pump inhibitors you may be familiar with:
Proton pump inhibitors are far more toxic to the body than the old H2 inhibitors that they replaced.
The danger is that the stomach lining produces many different hormones and important chemicals to the body, including what is called intrinsic factor. Intrinsic factor has an important role to play in vitamin B12. There are incredibly complex mechanisms ago on in the stomach lining.
We know this best now, because when obese people get a gastric bypass operation, there are many surprising effects. And it has been determined that many of these effects are due to the loss of chemicals being produced in the stomach lining.
I believe that the results for protein pump inhibitors that they encourage the growth of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain found in Alzheimer’s will also mean that people getting gastric bypass surgery will have a similarly higher incidence of Alzheimer’s.
In the following diagram, a brain scan, the A and C brains have beta amyloid plaques, compared to the B and D brains which do not. In that scan, you want all dark blue or purple.
But instead, with the A and the C brain, you have a lot of areas of beta-amyloid activity.
Now this new study on proton pump inhibitors shows that many years later, after taking them, you are much more susceptible to the growth of beta-amyloid plaques in your brain, those associated with the brain damage from Alzheimer’s disease.
One of the problems with the entire drug business today is that they never do randomized controlled trials that demonstrate what happens with the drug. They don’t ever have a comparison of people treated with the drug, versus people not treated with a drug, which are then monitored for a while.
So instead, we have to settle for studies like this one, either prospective studies or observational studies. There can still be a lot learned.
As the authors explain:
The avoidance of PPI medication may prevent the development of dementia.
The fact is that this is not the only study that shows proton pump inhibitor medications may cause Alzheimer’s. As the authors of this study conclude:
This finding is supported by recent pharmacoepidemiological analyses on primary data and is in line with mouse models in which the use of PPIs increased the levels of β-amyloid in the brains of mice.
So if you are taking proton pump inhibitors, I suggest you speak to your doctor about switching to the older kind, the H2 ones. Or perhaps you don’t need it at all. There may be ways of changing your diet and lifestyle around that remove the need for these drugs in the first place.
Citations
Proton-pump inhibitors retrieved 2-22-16 3:07PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-pump_inhibitor
Association of Proton Pump Inhibitors With Risk of Dementia
http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2487379
Binding Characteristics of Radiofluorinated 6-Dialkylamino-2- Naphthylethylidene Derivatives as Positron Emission Tomography Imaging Probes for -Amyloid Plaques in Alzheimer’s Disease
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir_Kepe/publication/11621001_Binding_Characteristics_of_Radiofluorinated_6-Dialkylamino-2-Naphthylethylidene_Derivatives_as_Positron_Emission_Tomography_Imaging_Probes_for_b-Amyloid_Plaques_in_Alzheimer’s_Disease/links/5579b4c408ae752158717739.pdf
Click for more information on Proton-pump Inhibitors, for information on Medicine, or for more on Proton Pump Inhibitors With Risk of Dementia.