When Pfizer acquired Wyeth after an eternity of stone cold silence in health care M & A, people got so worked-up they became tongue-tied trying to spread the news.

But then Merck bought The Plough, Roche sealed the deal with G-Tech and Gilead Sciences signed a definitive agreement to acquire CV Therapeutics and just like that, it is raining deals in Big Pharmaworld.

Gilead offered $20 per share or $1.4 billion in cash for CVT. That topped by 25% a hostile offer made 2 weeks ago by Astellas Pharma.

Gilead is best known for a trio of HIV drugs, but it’s got a dollar on darusentan which is in phase III trials for refractory hypertension. And its eyes are on CVT’s prize, which is Ranexa, a drug just recently approved as a first line agent for the management of angina pectoris. 

“The acquisition of CV Therapeutics represents a unique opportunity to complement and strengthen our growing cardiovascular portfolio,” Gilead chairman CEO John Martin said.

Last year, Ranexa did $109 million in sales. That’s a vanishingly small percentage of the market for chronic angina, a condition afflicting nearly 10 million Americans.

The FDA had approved Ranexa in 2006, but only in patients that had failed therapy with beta blockers, calcium channel blockers and nitrates, on grounds that it increased the risk of potentially life-threatening arrhythmias.

CVTs internal research had actually suggested that the drug may prevent arrhythmias, and a large randomized trial published in 2007 eventually supported the company’s view.

Safe though Ranexa may be, Gilead’s still got a major problem on its hands trying to squeeze big dollars out of Ranexa when so many different, effective angina drugs are available in generic form.

Just about everyone gestures in meaningful ways when they talk.

Heck the Big O once playfully recounted that his kneecapping chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had lost some middle finger as a teen while slicing beef at Arby’s and it “rendered him practically mute.”

But can it be that gesturing actually helps people think?

Yes, according to Susan Goldin-Meadow who reported her findings at the recent meeting of the AAAS.

Goldin-Meadow showed children a blackboard containing an equation like this: 3 + 4 + 5 = x + 5, and asked them to solve for x.

In the equation, the number immediately to the left of the equal sign is the same as the last one on the right, so x equals the sum of the first two numbers on the left.

Goldin-Meadow knew that kids just learning math don’t necessarily see things that way; they solve the problem by adding the three numbers on the left and going from there.

In previous experiments, Goldin-Meadow observed that kids use gestures when describing how they solved math problems.

To determine whether the hand movements actually helped kids think things through, she taught kids in 2 groups the short-cut way to solve these equations. She asked kids in the first group to gesture all they wanted during the lesson, and those in the second to refrain from doing so.

Kids in the first group learned more from the tutorial than those in the second. Also it seemed, kids in the first group often touched or pointed to the equation’s first two numbers on the left.

So in a follow-up experiment, Goldin-Meadow used this gesture explicitly in teaching another group of kids, call them Group A. She taught a Group B by pointing to different numbers in the equation, and a third group using no gestures.

Kids in Group A learned the most, followed by those in Group B. In last place were those who learned without the gestures.

The conclusion was that gesturing improves thinking, and even incorrect gestures have value.

Residents in neighborhoods having the highest density of fast-food restaurants are 13% more likely to sustain an ischemic stroke than those living in areas sparsely populated by the cholesterol dens.

At least that’s what a team of scientists led by Lewis Morgenstern of the University of Michigan reported at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference last week.

The team observed the association by analyzing information regarding 1,247 ischemic strokes that took place in Nueces County, Texas over a 2 ½ year period ending in June 2003.

Data had been collected in a stroke registry known as the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi project. That is not a good name, by the way.

Neuces County has 262 fast-food restaurants, according to the scientists, who defined them as having at least 2 of the following: limited or absent waiters and waitresses, you pay before you get the goods, fast service and a lot of takeout orders.
 
The scientists then determined the number of fast-food outlets in all 64 of the County’s US Census Bureau tracts, and ranked them by the number of outlets. The low-density quartile had fewer than 12 lipid bazaars, while the high-density neighborhoods boasted 33 or more.
 
According to the scientists, each grease joint hiked the relative risk of stroke by 1%.
 
But Morgenstern was cautious about over-interpreting his team’s findings. The neurology professor told BurrillReport “what we don’t know is whether fast food actually increased the risk because of its contents, or whether fast-food restaurants are a marker of unhealthy neighborhoods.”

“Is it direct consumption of fast food? Is it the lack of more healthy options? Is there something completely different in these neighborhoods that is associated with poor health?”