geoffrey modest medical blogs

  The NY Times had a recent article on cytisine as an effective treatment for smoking cessation:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/well/quit-smoking-cytisine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb   they make a few well-substantiated points: -- it is pretty easy to stop smoking, the issue is maintaing abstinence (and 47%  of those who try to quit are smoking 1 year later:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3723776/  ) -- cytisine was developed as a pill in Bulgaria in 1964 and has been used in Eastern Europe for 50 years for smoking cessation -- cytisine was approved in Canada in 2017 and Britain last year for smoking cessation -- there have been many scientific articles showing a great effect of cytisine in smoking cessation (several noted below), with a 2014 editorial by Nancy Rigotti referring to cytisine as “a tobacco treatment hiding in plain sight”:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1412313 ...

Here are 2 pretty convincing articles suggesting that GLP-1 receptor agonists  (GLP-1RAs) might be important medications to treat alcohol use disorder (AUD)     ---------------------------------------------------------   1. a rat study:  alcohol dec with semaglutide rats lancet2023  in dropbox, or doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2023.104642 -- male and female rats were studied, rats that were bred to have a voluntary high and stable alcohol consumption that created pharmacologically relevant blood alcohol concentrations   -- acute and repeated semaglutide administration led to significant reductions in alcohol intake and prevented relapse-like drinking in both male and female rats (relapses being simulated by withdrawing semaglutide after it had led to decreased alcohol consumption, rats then resuming drinking, then reinitiating semaglutide with good effect)       -- there was no decrease in drinking water or total liquid intake (there actu...