Good morning! Did you hear the story about the dog who kept his immobile owner warm and fought off coyotes — for two days? Last week, an Akita named Hero (yes, seriously) brought attention to the 61-year-old Albertan stuck up to his hips in mud. Good thing the good boi didn’t paws for a second on the job.

☕️Postcall’s one-sip markets update:

Stock are not joking around — they’re been on a tear non-stop since the beginning of the year. The growth-iest sector actually wasn’t tech (despite our tech-heavy coverage in Postcall), but actually energy, which has been up 10% in just March.

Ready for this week’s stories? They start… now.

Staying #Up2Date 🚨

1. Co-prescribing serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and oral anticoagulants (OAC)?

A population-based study in patients with afib has found that concomitant use of SSRI and OAC was associated with a 33% increased risk of major bleeding compared with OAC use alone. What does this mean in practice? The relatively small absolute excess risk might be acceptable in those with strong indications for both drugs. In patients with marginal indications, however, it may be necessary to de-prescribe one of them. Of note, changing from a high- to a low-potency SSRI does not appear to offer any risk mitigation.

2. Noncirrhotic nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) news

There’s a new FDA-approved drug for NASH and moderate-to-advanced hepatic fibrosis. Resmetitrom or Rezdiffra is a thyroid hormone receptor-β agonist which promotes hepatic fat metabolism and prevents hepatic injury resulting from lipotoxicity. Resmetirom was superior to placebo in the MAESTRO-NASH trial, though a majority of participants did not meet criteria for improved liver histology at 12 months. This ain’t Texas, so we’re not sure if and when this drug will be available in Canada. 

3. MoCA matters

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a widely used screening tool for cognitive impairment (CI). A study with >231 adults in the community aged 65+ found that the current MoCA cutoffs were inappropriately high leading to higher false-positive rates of 32% for CI and 92% for dementia. A cutoff of 18 on the English MoCA and 16 on the Spanish MoCA (out of 30) may be more appropriate when applied to a diverse, urban population. 

NOTE: In last week's edition of "Staying #Up2Date," there was an error in the data for maternal mortality. We wrote "maternal mortality in the US has increased — from 18% to 32% between 2018-2021," but this should have read, “from 18 to 32 deaths per 100K births between 2018-2021.” This was amended on the web version on Mar. 27, 2024.

AI Is Cropping Up In Farms

How some US farmers are taking the term “farm hand” to the next level.

What happened: Hylio, a Houston-based tech company, created drones that can spray fertilizer on 150 acres of land every hour.

Why it’s interesting: Developers of these tools say their inventions could help ease the decades-long labour shortage that’s been impacting the US agriculture industry. (Between 1950 and 2000, the number of hired farm labourers declined by more than 50%).

The agricultural industry has been in cahoots with AI for a while now — since 2021, 87% of agricultural businesses in the US use AI. Aside from drones, an app was created that can detect harmful bugs. Some large-scale farms have introduced training programs to help farmers and their employees learn AI. The federal government is fast-tracking the industry, providing financial incentives to speed up AI farming development. 

But: one farmer from California said she was disappointed when she heard the news of the AI advancements because it may ruin the “spiritual connection between humans and plants.” A farm hand, who immigrated from Mexico 36 years ago, said that, although farmers may be benefiting from the advancements, employees like him aren’t. (It used to take a group of workers to harvest vegetables. Now, it takes 3.)

Bottom line: As AI continues to help the next generation of farmers with the labour shortage, the next problem we hope it solves is: what came first, the chicken or the egg?

👨‍💻Tech Bites

1: 📢 In the future, AI might be able to diagnosis diseases like COVID-19 and TB just by listening to audio clips. Google has developed a machine-learning tool that analyzes sounds like coughing and breathing.

2: 📱Addicted to your phone? There’s a methadone for that: a company named Palmsy is building a social network where you post anything and get lots of likes on those posts. The catch: no one can see the posts.

3: 🍆 That dick pic might actually be of some use: A new app called Calmara is claiming it can detect an STI from a photograph of a penis. Does it work? We’re skeptical, given that the majority of STIs are asymptomatic.

4: 🥈 Ok, here’s an actual that might actually work (and potentially double the productivity of radiologists): The University of Aberdeen in the UK announced recently that an AI tool called Mia found an additional 12 percent more breast cancers than doctors did in routine practice. However, it doesn’t have access to history (so has lots of false positives), and the trial results aren’t yet peer reviewed.

Notable Numbers 🔢

20: the age of Gmail this week. Fun fact: when it was first released, people thought it was a prank — the 1 GB allowed users to keep ~13,500 emails (Yahoo and Hotmail maxed out at about 60 emails).

2021: the year the "Yamagata lineage" of flu viruses was reported extinct. Advised by the FDA to be removed from next year’s flu vaccine, it’s thought that COVID-19 precautions were responsible for wiping out this flu family tree.

41M: the population of Canada as of exactly one week ago. This comes 9 months after Canada hit 40M.

$718,750: the auction price of the floating prop door from the 1997 movie Titanic. (We’ll never let go, Jack.)

Postcall Picks ✅ 

👀 Watch: the eclipse on April 8th. Niagara, Belleville, and Montreal are some of the best places to watch from. If you’re in Toronto, here are some events around the city.

🛫 Travel: Looking to get away this summer? CME Away is offering a cruise trip to Alaska and the Dawes Glacier this July 19-26, 2024, for $1245 (Conference tuition). Departs from Seattle and topics covered include palliative care and transgender health.

👂️ Listen: to kids talk about how they feel about social media in this episode of Hard Fork from NYT. Our favourite quote:

The NYT piece was based on Jonathan Haidt‘s new book The Anxious Generation, but a review in Nature points out that there is a lack of evidence for (and indeed, some evidence against) the main theses of the book.

📸 Picture: Take one better than anyone else on an iPhone, with these tips from a pro. 

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