Stop The Presses!!!
There's a new study circulating in the global media since about a week, which puts things this way: those who have low grip strength should seriously contemplate the possibility that they might be dead of a heart attack or stroke within four years. According to the study, this applies to everyone regardless of whether he or she is 35 or 75. In other words, if one is anything other than a manual laborer, a career change should be seriously considered.
Fatal heart attacks seem to have become quite an issue for even the most unlikely of victims these days. Witness the tragic deaths of the two Belgian footballers Gregory Mertens (24 years old) & Tim Nicot (23 years old). The whole world felt the deepest sympathy for the poor fellows themselves & their grieving families. Did they have weak grips? That seems highly unlikely, considering that they were both strong star athletes. However, since the study hasn't actually answered that question just yet, perhaps we should wait & see whether they had thought of looking into it.
Anyway, as far as most people around the world are concerned, if the World Health Organization (WHO) hasn't confirmed the veracity of any particular study, that means there is no cause for concern. The world will probably just go on with life as usual.
But if this study continues to receive global media attention (even if simply in the name of selling more newspapers), there are two companies in particular that might just get a badly-needed financial boost, because modern medicine says that if a patient is at risk for a heart attack or stroke, the best way to prevent such an outcome is to take relatively small dosages of heart disease medication on a regular basis.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
GlaxoSmithKline is the sixth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Last year it made approximately US$36 billion in revenues & currently employs over 100,000 people around the world. But ever since the China Scandal in 2013, GSK stock has been on a steady decline...& so far all the damage control & public relations strategies have been no more than a drop in the ocean of GSK's troubles.
Coreg (active ingredient Carvedilol) is considered a highly-effective heart disease medication - & GSK is the main distributor of the drug. If all those whose job required them to have gentle hands - everyone from surgeons to seamstresses - were convinced that they are at risk of a heart attack or stroke, Coreg sales would skyrocket in a matter of days...& GSK would theoretically be home free.
AstraZeneca (AZN)
AstraZeneca is the seventh-largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Last year it made approximately US$26 billion in revenues & employs around 50,000 people globally. But AZN has had nothing but bad luck for the last 8 years:
First, in 2007, Marcia Angell (former New England Journal Of Medicine editor-in-chief & a Harvard Medical School lecturer in social medicine) accused AZN scientists of misrepresenting their research on the efficacy of AZN's star product Nexium (active ingredient Esomeprazole).
Next AZN had to pay approximately US$800 million to settle a UK tax dispute related to transfer mispricing in 2010.
As if these two unfortunate incidents were not enough, AZN had to pay the US authorities US$68.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company deliberately defrauded Medicaid, Medicare & other government-funded health care programs with the deceptive promotional practices it used to market its blockbuster antipsychotic Seroquel.
The result is that AZN stock has been terribly shaky at best. But AZN also markets a blood pressure medication by the name of Toprol-XL (active ingredient Metoprolol Succinate). As emphasised earlier, if the hypothetical correlation between grip strength & the risk of heart attacks & strokes is given more credence than it deserves, AZN might finally be able to climb out of the financial mess it has been in all these years.
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