Did cannabis oil save Deryn Blackwell ’ s life?
In a forthcoming book The Boy in 7 Billion, Callie Blackwell claims that cannabis oil, which she had started giving her son Deryn to relieve his symptoms during a bone marrow transplant for two cancers, actually saved his life when the bone marrow transplant appeared to be failing. Unfortunately, her story appears to be another testimonial that confuses correlation with causation. (Source: Respectful Insolence)
Source: Respectful Insolence - April 3, 2017 Category: Surgery Authors: Orac Tags: Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking bone marrow transplant Callie Blackwell cannabis cannabis oil Deryn Blackwell Karen Hockney Source Type: blogs
How Do We Protect Patients From False Promises In Right-To-Try Laws?
My sister Gale had exhausted every option. Metastatic cancer raged through her body, defeating all conventional treatments. She faced a final decision: succumb to the disease, or wage one last battle with an experimental bone marrow transplant known to kill 20 percent of patients. Gale chose to fight, opting to use the unproven therapy at a time when institutional review boards and scientific peer review regulated experimental therapies rather than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Now, three decades later, the FDA has an expanded access policy, also known as “compassionate use,” that seeks to ensure the quality ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 14, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Ellen Sigal Tags: End of Life & Serious Illness Quality Compassionate Use experimental therapies right to try terminal illness Source Type: blogs
Age-Related Failure of Autophagy Contributes to Stem Cell Decline
Researchers here provide evidence that points to declining autophagy as a cause of the faltering stem cell activity that accompanies aging. Autophagy is an important process of cellular maintenance, a part of recycling damaged structures and proteins within cells. Increased levels of autophagy are a feature of numerous methods of modestly slowing aging demonstrated in mice and other laboratory species. Unfortunately autophagy fails with age; like all systems it is impacted by the accumulation of molecular damage, and in particular in this case, by the growing amounts of metabolic waste making up lipofuscin, a mix of variou...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 6, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 5th 2016
This study is a good example of the degree to which the choice to remain active in later life makes a difference. That implies a range of other choices over the decades in order to raise the odds that you can in fact choose to remain active when older, such as avoiding weight gain.
Moderate physical activity is associated with a greater than 50% reduction in cardiovascular death in over-65s. The 12 year study in nearly 2500 adults aged 65 to 74 years found that moderate physical activity reduced the risk of an acute cardiovascular event by more than 30%. High levels of physical activity led to greater risk reducti...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 4, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
The Potential Use of Cell Therapies to Treat Immunosenescence
Immunosenescence is the name given to the decline of immune system effectiveness with aging, a large component of the frailty that arises in later life. This decline is partially a result of a failing supply of new immune cells, and partially a result of a growing misconfiguration of the immune system as a whole, driven by life-long exposure to infections. On this second front, persistent infection by herpesviruses such as cytomegalovirus appears to be particularly problematic, the cause of large fractions of the immune cell population in an old individual becoming specialized and unable to react to new threats. This open ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 30, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A Potential Way to Speed the Recovery Phase of an Immune System Reboot
There is great potential in the destruction and recreation of the immune system: the removal of all immune cells and replacement with new cells. This is an approach capable of curing autoimmune conditions, but perhaps more importantly it might also be used to clear out much of the dysfunction of the aged immune system. Immune system decline is an important component of the frailty of aging, and it speeds other aspects of the aging process through inflammation and a growing failure to monitor and destroy potentially harmful cells, such as those that become senescent. Just recently researchers made real progress on the immun...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 26, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 22nd 2016
This study provides additional fuel to really bolster research efforts by us and others in geroscience, a field that seeks to understand relationships between the biology of aging and age-related diseases. Aging is the most important risk factor for common chronic conditions such as heart disease, Alzheimer's and cancer, which are likely to share pathways with aging and therefore interventions designed to slow biological aging processes may also delay the onset of disease and disability, thus expanding years of healthy and independent lives for our seniors."
Longer-Lived Parents and Cardiovascular Outcomes
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Source: Fight Aging! - August 21, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Safely Destroying Blood Stem Cells to Enable Immune System Restoration
Destroying and recreating the immune system is a potentially very effective way to treat autoimmune conditions, as the basis of that condition lies in the broken configuration and memory of existing immune cells. The aging immune system has similar problems in its population and cell behaviors, problems that might be removed by replacing all immune cells wholesale. Present strategies to destroy the immune system require harsh chemotherapy, however, which makes it hard to justify on a cost-benefit basis for anything except the most harmful of conditions. Undergoing chemotherapy of this nature has a high mortality rate, and ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 15, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Patients are blindfolded to charges and cost
As she adjusts her sunglasses, Mary squints to protect her sensitive eyes from the sun. Four years ago when lymphoma threatened her life, doctors gave her a 5 percent chance of survival.
“I really should be dead right now,” she states casually. A bone marrow transplant gave this patient a new lease on life, allowing for the treasured opportunity to mother her 8-year-old son. The transplant has been successful, but her body is riddled with graft versus host (GVH) disease, a reaction that has attacked her skin and eyes, resulting in pain and disfigurement.
Mary has survived the grueling experience with not only her lif...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - July 5, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Aida Cerundolo, MD Tags: Physician Emergency Source Type: blogs
Reflecting on Father’s Day and Fertility
My dad taught me a lot. Because of him, I’m a passionate sports fan. I was wrapped in a Cubs blanket when I was born – remnants of his hometown of Chicago traveled with him to my birthplace in Austin. Baseball, football, basketball, golf, soccer… he introduced me to all of those and more. But above all, he taught me to be competitive.
I owe a lot to my dad. Yes, he may have instilled a deep love for heartbreaking teams like the Chicago Cubs and Bears, but also the legacies of coaches like Vince Lombardi and Jimmy V. He positively reinforced my athletic endeavors. It was never “don’t strike out” but always ...
Source: LIVESTRONG Blog - June 16, 2016 Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: LIVESTRONG Staff Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 16th 2016
In this study the authors demonstrate that, as in many other cases, the methodology of delivery matters just as much as the details of the cells used:
Retinal and macular degenerative diseases affect millions of people worldwide. Similar to other neurodegenerative diseases, there are no effective treatments that can stop retinal degeneration or restore degenerative retina. Recent advances in stem cell technology led to development of novel cell-based therapies, some are already in phase I/II clinical trials. Studies from our group and others suggest that human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBM-MSC) m...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 15, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Age-Related Inflammation Drives Development of Atherosclerosis
In its later stages atherosclerosis is a vicious cycle in which oxidized lipids and the remains of dead cells build up into deposits in blood vessel walls, growing because these deposits cause nearby healthy cells to signal for help. That produces an inflammatory response and attracts the immune cells called macrophages that try and fail to clean up the mess, adding their own remains to the disaster area. As a result of this process of ever-widening damage, blood vessels weaken, narrow, and are ultimately blocked, causing incapacity and death.
Inflammation in blood vessel walls is an important driver of atherosclero...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 9, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
"Life Support" – a Play about Palliative Care
Johns Hopkins Hospital is hosting several performances of a 90-minute play called "Life Support." The play is about a man in a Baltimore hospital resisting his inevitable demise.
The Baltimore Sun reviewed the play. In part: "At the center of Life Support is a 65-year-old man named Karl, who is on his fifth wife and, due to complications from a bone marrow transplant, his last leg — not that he accepts anything about mortality. A businessman with a track record of getting and staying ahead, Karl is convinced he can overcome this obstacle, too."
I will be in Baltimore on one of the performance...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - April 15, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD Tags: Health Care medical futility blog syndicated Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 4th 2016
This study shows for the first time that increasing arterial stiffness is detrimental to the brain, and that increasing stiffness and brain injury begin in early middle life, before we commonly think of prevalent diseases such as atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease or stroke having an impact."
The study also noted that elevated arterial stiffness is the earliest manifestation of systolic hypertension. The large study involved approximately 1,900 diverse participants in the Framingham Heart Study, who underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as arterial tonometry. The tests measured the force of art...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 3, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
DNA Debris From Dying Fat Cells Causes Chronic Inflammation
We examined the association between obesity and the release of cfDNA, and investigated the role of cfDNA in macrophage activation and in the development of adipose tissue inflammation and insulin resistance by using a diet-induced obesity model, a bone marrow transplantation (BMT) model, and an in vivo TLR9 inhibition study involving wild-type and TLR9-deficient (Tlr9−/−) mice. Furthermore, we examined cfDNA level in human plasma to show clinically translatable evidence. Our study may provide a novel mechanism for the development of adipose tissue inflammation and a potential therapeutic target for insulin resistance.
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Source: Fight Aging! - March 27, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
