Coffee’s protective effect

Haven't we talked about this before? Why are we making more studies of the issue?

People who over-indulge in alcohol and food risk serious damage to their livers, but a new study suggests that they might benefit from an extra cup of joe, The Washington Post reports. New research has found that drinking more coffee could help safeguard the liver, which is crucial to many metabolic processes. Researchers analyzed data from nine previously published studies, encompassing more than 430,000 participants, and found that drinking two additional cups of coffee a day was associated with a 44 percent lower risk of developing cirrhosis. A potentially fatal condition with no cure, cirrhosis involves the hardening and destruction of liver tissue, and kills more than 1 million people a year worldwide. Apart from alcohol consumption, cirrhosis may be caused by hepatitis infections, immune disorders, and fatty liver disease, which is tied to obesity and diabetes. How java works its magic on the liver is unclear, but study author Oliver Kennedy says it’s nice to know that you can get such large benefits from “a cheap, ubiquitous, and well-tolerated beverage.”

Taken from the March 11th edition of The Week Magazine.

Healing without drugs

This one is a doozie... Gives new weight to "The Secret" doesn't it - to manifest good health through the use of the brain. (I know it's whacky to say so, but I do believe in using the mind to bring good things in to your life... not Ferraris, per se, but if you treat others the way you want to be treated, for example, or if you give lots of kisses you will get lots of kisses... but I digress!)

Gag, just read the effects the pharmaceuticals had on the poor child. I am not a Christian Scientist, but, wow.

On a related note, I read Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal and it is very thought-provoking and I recommend it to everyone.

Ivan Pavlov - photo taken from here.

In an echo of Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments, studies show we can train our bodies into thinking we’ve had medicine. Science journalist Jo Marchant investigates whether we can harness the mind to slash drug costs.
Marette Flies was 11 when her immune system turned against her. A cheerful student from Minneapolis, she had curly brown hair and a pale, moon-shaped face, and she loved playing trumpet. But in 1983, she was diagnosed with lupus, a condition in which the immune system destroys the body’s healthy tissues.
It ran rampant, attacking her body on multiple fronts. She was given steroids to suppress her immune system; the drugs made her face swell up, and her hair fell out. But despite the treatment, her condition worsened over the next two years, causing inflamed kidneys, frequent headaches, seizures, and high blood pressure.
By 1985, antibodies were attacking a vital clotting factor in Marette’s blood, causing her to bleed uncontrollably. It got so bad that her doctors considered giving her a hysterectomy, because they were worried that when her periods started she might bleed to death. She took drugs, including barbiturates, antihypertensives, diuretics, and steroids, but her blood pressure kept rising. Then her heart started to fail, and her doctors reluctantly decided to give her Cytoxan, an extremely toxic drug.
Cytoxan is very good at suppressing the immune system. But it causes vomiting, stomachaches, bruising, bleeding, and kidney and liver damage, and increases the risk of infections and cancer, and at the time its use in humans was experimental. Karen Olness, a psychologist and pediatrician now at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was helping Marette cope with the stress and pain of her condition, and she was concerned that if lupus didn’t kill the teenager, this new drug might. Then Marette’s mother showed Olness a scientific paper she had seen. The author claimed to have slowed lupus in mice—but with just half the usual dose of Cytoxan.
The results were part of a well-known and seemingly mundane phenomenon that has been driving a quiet revolution in immunology. Proponents hope that the process, by allowing doctors to cut drug doses, will not only minimize harmful side effects but also slash billions from health-care costs, transforming treatment for conditions such as autoimmune disorders and cancer. The secret? Teaching your body how to respond to a particular medicine, so that in the future it can trigger the same change on its own.
Ever eaten a favorite food that made you sick—prawns, say—and discovered that for weeks or months afterward, you couldn’t face eating it? This effect is called learned or conditioned taste aversion, and it makes sense: Avoiding foods that have poisoned us in the past protects us from getting ill again.
In 1975, Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in New York, was studying taste aversion in rats and got an utterly mystifying result. Ader gave his animals saccharin solution to drink. Rats usually love the sweet taste, but Ader paired the drink with injections of Cytoxan, which made them feel sick. When he later gave the animals the sweetened water on its own they refused to drink it, just as he expected. So to find out how long the learned aversion would last, he force-fed this harmless drink to them using an eyedropper. But the rats didn’t forget. Instead, one by one, they died.
After more experiments, Ader concluded that when the animals received saccharin and the drug together, they hadn’t just associated the sweet taste with feeling sick; they’d also learned the immunosuppression. Eventually, they’d responded to the sweetened water just as they had to the drug. Even though the second phase of the experiment involved no drug at all, the water Ader fed them suppressed their immune systems so dramatically that they succumbed to fatal infections. In other words, their bodies were reacting to something that wasn’t really there, just because the circumstances made them expect it.
The phenomenon in which we learn to associate a contextual cue with a physiological response is well known. It’s called conditioning, and was discovered in the 1890s by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who noticed that dogs learned to associate his presence with being fed, so that his arrival caused them to salivate even if he had no food. He showed that different signals, such as a buzzer or electric shock, could all be made to trigger the same response.
Such learned associations are an important part of our daily lives. Cues prepare the body for important biological events such as eating or sex, and they trigger responses that have evolved to help us avoid or flee from danger. Exposure to a stimulus we associate with a previous allergic reaction, such as a grassy field or fluffy cat, can make us cough or sneeze even if no physical allergen is present, while previously scary situations, like a barking dog or an enclosed space, can induce a state of fight-or-flight.
Ader’s result was revolutionary because it showed that learned associations don’t affect just brain-regulated responses like nausea or salivation. His rats proved that these associations influence immune responses too, to the point where a taste or smell can make the difference between life and death. The body’s fight against disease, his experiment suggested, is guided by the brain.
In fact, a similar discovery had already been made. In the 1920s, Russian researchers at the University of St. Petersburg were following up on Pavlov’s work, to see which other physiological responses could be conditioned.
Among them was the immunologist Sergey Metalnikov. Instead of suppressing the immune system, as Ader would, Metalnikov wanted to boost it. In one experiment, he repeatedly warmed guinea pigs’ skin and at the same time gave them injections that triggered an immune response. Then he gave them and another group of unconditioned guinea pigs a normally lethal dose of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, while warming both groups’ skin. The unconditioned animals died within eight hours, whereas the conditioned ones survived an average of 36 hours, and some of them recovered completely. Their response to a learned cue—heat—appeared to have saved their lives.
In a 1982 study, Ader used conditioning to treat mice that had a lupus-like disease. He trained them to associate Cytoxan with saccharin solution, just as in his original experiment. After they learned the association, he kept giving the mice sweetened water along with half the usual drug dose for lupus. Compared with mice that received the same dose but weren’t conditioned, they lived longer, and their disease progressed more slowly. This was the paper that Marette’s mother had seen.
Karen Olness telephoned Ader and asked: Would his conditioning work on Marette? Could they train her immune system to respond to a lower Cytoxan dose than normal, sparing her the worst of the drug’s toxicity? Ader agreed to try.
The first question was what taste to use. “We had to choose something that was unique, that she hadn’t experienced before,” says Olness. She considered vinegars, horehound, eucalyptus chips, and various liqueurs before finally settling on a combination of rose perfume and cod liver oil.
Marette’s treatment started the next morning. She sipped the cod liver oil as Cytoxan flowed through an IV line into a vein in her foot. Meanwhile, Olness uncapped the rose perfume and waved it around the room.
They repeated this bizarre ritual once a month for the next three months. After that, Marette was exposed to cod liver oil and perfume every month, but received Cytoxan only every third month. By the end of the year, she had received just six doses of the drug instead of the usual 12.
Marette responded as well as her doctors would have hoped from the full drug regimen. The clotting factor reappeared, and her blood pressure returned to normal. She went to college, where she played trumpet in the school band.
At nine o’clock every morning and evening, an alarm goes off on Barbara Nowak’s mobile phone. When she hears it, the 46-year-old geologist sits down at her kitchen table in Sprockhövel, northern Germany, and takes a powerful cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs. But today there’s a change in her routine. Before swallowing the pills, she downs a drink. It’s sweet, bitter, neon green—and tastes strongly of lavender.
In 1988, when she was 19, Nowak lost her kidneys to lupus. Receiving a donated kidney transformed her health. “It’s another life,” she says. But there’s a downside. She’s dependent on twice-daily medication to suppress the immune responses that would destroy her transplant—drugs that slowly poison the very organ she’s trying to save.
So Nowak is drinking this gaudy concoction as part of a pioneering trial. The green drink is an updated version of Marette’s rose and cod liver oil, invented to test conditioned responses. Manfred Schedlowski, a medical psychologist at the University of Essen in Germany, wanted something strange and unforgettable that stimulates several senses at once. He hit on strawberry milk mixed with green food coloring and essential oil. Its bright color and overwhelming lavender flavor create a bewildering mix of sensory cues.
So far, Schedlowski has shown that after the drink is associated with CsA, a drug similar to Cytoxan, it reliably induces immunosuppression in healthy volunteers, creating on average 60 to 80 percent of the effect of the drug. But will it work in sick patients?
In the learning phase of the study, Nowak drank the lavender milk alongside her drugs, morning and evening, for three days. Then, after a two-day break, came the “evocation” phase, using the drink to try to amplify the effect of her medication. She again downed the drink with her drugs, but also drank it two extra times during the day, along with a placebo pill.
A 2013 trial was promising: In all four patients, adding the green drink suppressed immune-cell proliferation by up to 40 percent more than drugs alone. Now Nowak is part of a larger study of about 20 patients. If that works, too, the next step will be to test whether the conditioned response can be maintained while doses start to be reduced.
Besides helping with organ transplants, there’s a plethora of uses that conditioning might have, by reducing harmful side effects or simply making treatment more cost-effective. Other possibilities include the relief of allergies and autoimmune conditions.
Ader carried out a small study in 1996 that paired Cytoxan with aniseed-flavored syrup in 10 people who had multiple sclerosis. When later given the syrup alongside a placebo pill, eight of them responded with immunosuppression similar to that produced by the active drug. In another study, published shortly before he died in 2011, Ader reported that quarter- or half-doses of corticosteroid ointment plus conditioned response could control psoriasis just as well as a full drug dose.
Animal studies hint that the approach might also be useful in the treatment of some cancers. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, have trained mice to associate the taste of camphor with a drug that activates white blood cells that attack tumors. Then they transplanted aggressive tumors into the mice. The animals given doses of camphor survived longer than those treated with immunotherapy, and in one experiment, two mice defeated their cancer altogether, despite receiving no active drug.
Years of research are required before conditioning regimes for cancer or transplant patients reach the clinic, but Schedlowski says the principle could be used much sooner to reduce drug doses for conditions such as asthma or arthritis. Someone could be prescribed a suitable drug, and after two or three weeks of taking it regularly could switch to a pack in which real pills were interspersed with identical placebos.
But the idea is not widely accepted. Reducing drug doses isn’t attractive to drug companies, but a wider problem is that for most doctors and scientists, the concept of treatments with no pharmaceutical component just makes no sense.
Schedlowski is steadfastly optimistic that the benefits of conditioning are too great to ignore. “Ten years ago, nobody believed us,” he says. “Now, journals are much more open-minded to this kind of approach.”
Still, there’s a long way to go. Ader remains barely known, even among immunologists. Schedlowski leads one of the only teams researching conditioned immune response. “I like to say we’re the best in the world,” he jokes. “Because there is nobody else!”
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in MosaicScience.com. Reprinted by The Week with permission.
March 11, 2016

Photograph taken from the Chicago Tribune here.

Sleep-deprived nation

So important.... How can we make the choices to stay healthy if we are exhausted?

One does wonder who this is aimed at? I mean if one is living in conditions not conducive to sleep, what can you do about it? I listened to a story on the new the other day that a guy was killed right outside of this other guy's apartment and the bullets went right through the walls above his nose as he lay sleeping. If you are in an area of town where security is an issue, sleeping is tough. Or how about having a train rumble by every 20 minutes? That doesn;t help, either. How does this information help these insomniacs?

Taken from the BBC here

More than one-third of Americans—some 84 million people—aren’t getting enough sleep, research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals. An analysis of the sleep habits of more than 400,000 adults reveals that on average, only 65 percent sleep seven or more hours each night—the minimum amount recommended for good health. Previous research has shown that chronic sleep deprivation greatly increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and psychological problems. Race and economic status plays a role: Two-thirds of whites and Hispanics report getting a healthy amount of sleep, but only about 50 percent of black people say the same. Adequate sleep is also more common among college graduates and those with jobs than among people who are unemployed or have less education. To get more shut-eye, the CDC’s Wayne Giles tells NBCNews.com, people should adopt “lifestyle changes such as going to bed at the same time each night and rising at the same time each morning,” as well as “turning off or removing televisions, computers, and mobile devices from the bedroom.”

From the March 11th edition of the Week Magazine.

Oliver’s ‘immigrant crush’

Ok, the only reason I mention John Oliver is that I have a 2nd great grandmother with the name Oliver... And I have been researching that family name. It's the family I have been researching in New Orleans. (No luck so far, I'm disappointed to report.) Actually, as I write this, I realized I was surprised to find another female Oliver in my tree the other day, on a different branch... I need to do some research, but both women are far enough back that finding them is difficult.Makes me wonder how big the Oliver 'clan' is. Hmmm.

I'm interested in his statement about his son growing up with an American accent... He expresses his concern in a funny way, but I understand his concern that his son is not of the place where he is from. Silly concern, but true. It's like my nieces... they are westerners, not from New England, like their fathers. But, I suppose it'll help them get in to college on the East Coast....

John Oliver is obsessed with America, said David Marchese in New York magazine. The British comedian moved to the U.S. almost 10 years ago, and since then has forged a career out of pillorying America’s worst political excesses and weaknesses. Yet Oliver has developed a deep affection for the country—even if it’s the kind of fondness he once compared to falling in love with a girl while you’re holding her hair back as she’s vomiting. “When you’re not from here, America has an iconic, mysterious allure, and you want to know what it’s like. Then you get here and you realize it is slightly misplaced but that it’s also a more complicated country than anyone gives it credit for.” But he still has an “immigrant’s crush,” admits Oliver. “This is hard for a British person to say, but the principles by which the British were kicked out of this country are the best principles. Freedom of speech is still the best idea. I can call people chicken f---ers on television. I don’t take that for granted.” Oliver has mixed feelings, though, about his newborn son growing up with an American accent. “He’ll belong here, whereas one of the things that I like the most is that I don’t really fit in. There’s a kind of comfort in that.”

Taken from the March 4th edition of the Week Magazine. Man, this week's edition has been a treasure trove of food for thought for me.

Vicki Lee Fine Art (Another Lee, but not fiber art, either)

I came across Vicki Lee's work at "The Shops at 2011 Magazine". You know I had to promote her because a) I liked what I saw and b) her family name is Lee. A lot like this previous promotion of Victor Lee, who also is not a fiber artist.



I saw some of her encaustic abstract landscape pieces. I can see how they can set a mood in a room.

Given how many places she sells her art, I would suggest that she is a prodigious artist.


Here is what she writes about herself on her web site:

Thank you for viewing my artwork. My paintings express my desire to show a "less serious" side of life. I hope to transport my audience to an interesting and imaginative place where they can dream of future visits or remember the old ones.
Any of the abstract landscapes can be painted with other color palettes and sizes. Please contact me if you would like to view any of the paintings offered.
In New Orleans, my paintings are available for purchase at Estella's Home located on Metairie Road.
In Seagrove Beach, Florida, my paintings are available at Fouquet Design, 3723 E. 30A., Suite 6, Seagrove Beach, Fl., 32459, 850-534-0972 and Beau Interiors, 22 East County Hwy 30A, Grayton Beach, FL.
Thank you,
Vicki Lee

A Good Week For... Cutting Calories

Fears that food might be rotten? I wonder why that would be the case.

Photo taken from here

after researchers in Germany found that eating while blindfolded caused people to eat less and feel full faster than those who could see their food. Visual deprivation reduces the pleasure of eating, and triggers innate fears that food may be rotten.

Taken from the March 4th edition of the Week Magazine.

It Wasn't All Bad... Virginia McLaurin

To think of the things she has seen. I hope someone is writing it all down!

All her life, Virginia McLaurin has dreamed of the day she’d meet the nation’s first black president. The 106-year-old’s wish was granted this week [in February], when President Obama invited her to the White House to celebrate Black History Month. During a meet-and-greet with the president and first lady, the sprightly centenarian was so overcome with joy that she began dancing with the Obamas. “I am so happy!” she squealed, waving her cane in the air. “A black president, a black wife—and I’m here to celebrate black history!” Asked by President Obama for her secret to a long life, McLaurin replied, “Just keep moving!”

Taken from The Week magazine, March 4th edition.

Patriotic Dress at Century Girl, Vintage Boutique

I was wandering down Magazine Street when I saw this lovely patriotic dress on a mannequin outside of a new, lovely shop: Century Girl. She has lovely pieces... though each one of a kind, as they are vintage, used clothing, so you  need to get lucky to find what you want in your size.

I had to laugh when I saw a Gunne Sax dress amongst her things... I haven't thought of those since middle school - when I loved them!

Because I sew, I had to check out this dress. It reminded me of the skirts I have been making which we saw here. (And maybe I will eventually take a picture of the finished product, though I am still adding ribbon at the seams.)

I liked how the seamstress used some ribbon to cover up the seams, as I was doing. You can barely see that there is a zipper up the front.

This is a double skirt - a layer on a layer. Seems like a waste of fabric... though my skirts use a ton of fabric, the bottom layer being almost 10 yards.

Happy Independence Day 2016!

ADHD drug misuse rising

I wish these kids/young people would choose a better diet than these drugs. There seems to be increasing amounts of research which suggests that what we eat is creating this issue for us... get some kimchi and be done with it, for goodness sake!

Image taken from here

The misuse of stimulants prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is skyrocketing, a new study reveals, as college students and young professionals turn to the drugs for a mental edge. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that from 2006 to 2011, nonmedical use of the common ADHD drug Adderall surged 67 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds. During that time, emergency room visits associated with abuse of the medication increased by 156 percent. Almost three-quarters of the people who used Adderall for a nonmedical reason didn’t have a prescription, suggesting they had taken drugs meant for someone else. The researchers warn that habit-forming ADHD drugs can have significant side effects, including anxiety, elevated blood pressure, and seizures. “Many college students think stimulants like Adderall are harmless study aids,” study author Ramin Mojtabai tells ScienceWorldReport.com. “But there can be serious health risks.”

Again taken from the March 4th edition of the Week Magazine.

New Hope for Cancer Patients

Yes, I am doing a bit of catch up here....

HOLY SHIT - is this not amazing? Complete remission? But what do they mean the cells were genetically modified to 'make them better able to seek out and destroy cancerous cells'? How were those cells modified? I hope we hear further reports on these patients who have gone in to complete remission.

A new cancer therapy has met with remarkable success in early clinical trials and could be a game-changing weapon against America’s second leading cause of death. The technique is a kind of immunotherapy known as adoptive T-cell therapy. Whereas chemotherapy, radiation, and other conventional treatments target tumors directly but cause significant damage to healthy cells in the process, immunotherapy enhances the immune system and its ability to fight cancer. During the trials, researchers collected disease-fighting T cells from patients diagnosed with serious forms of blood cancer, including lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, MedicalDaily.com reports. The harvested T cells were genetically modified to make them better able to seek out and destroy cancerous cells, and then were reintroduced into each patient’s body. Despite grim prognoses—most had been given months to live—more than half the participants experienced complete remission. “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients,” says lead author Dr. Stanley Riddell. Among other caveats, it remains to be seen how long the trial patients will remain in remission. T-cell therapy also carries risks for life-threatening side effects, such as cytokine release syndrome, an overload of defense cells that causes extreme, full-body inflammation. “Like chemotherapy and radiotherapy, it’s not going to be a save-all,” Riddell says, but adds, “I think immunotherapy has finally made it to a pillar of cancer therapy.”

Taken from the March 4th edition of The Week Magazine.