I'm Joe Gradyton and I'm Terry Grady. Welcome to this podcast of the People's Pharmacy.

You can find previous podcasts and more information on a range of health topics at

People's Pharm pharmacy.com.

There are hundreds of rare diseases that don't have effective treatments,

but developing new drugs takes time and money.

This is the people's Pharmacy with Terry and Joe Grayden.

Many patients with hard to treat conditions can't afford to wait years for new medicines.

Is there a way to find out if existing drugs could be helpful?

Repurposing old drugs could save lives, but only if we learn how to use them effectively.

Our guest today is working urgently on figuring out which currently approved drugs might be useful

for something completely different. How can we find out about the pros and cons of such

off-label use? Coming up on the people's pharmacy teaching old drugs, new tricks.

In the People's Pharmacy Health Headlines, the U.S. mortality data on death rates during

2021 have just been finalized and the results are disappointing.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy for U.S. citizens in

2021 was 76.4 years. That's the lowest it's been since 1996. The leading

causes of death were heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19. In 2021, 3,464,231 people died in the United

States. That was 80, 502 more deaths than in 2020. COVID-19 was responsible

for that increased mortality. In 2020, it was determined that 350,831 people died from the coronavirus.

That jumped 18.8% to 416,8% to 416,893 in 2021.

To put life expectancy into context, men in the U.S. dropped from 74.2 years in 2020 to 73.5 in 2021.

Women dropped from 79.9 years in 2020

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