Friday, February 24, 2012

Medical stuff below the fold

Adding an old anti malaria medicine to chemo will help the chemo work better.

Actually, the medicine, Chloroquin, isn't used much for the bad malaria since the Falciparum form is resistant, but we do use it to treat some collagen diseases, because it has effects on the immune systhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifem. That makes sense, because Malaria is a parasite (in the animal family) not a plant (many antibiotics work on bacteria with cell walls by destroying the cell walls e.g. penicillin. Others do work on the metabolism of the bacteria, and you find they have other uses related to this).

it has something to do with autophagy, which is how the cell rids itself of damaged materials. But cancer cells do this more than normal cells, and recycle the damaged parts for energy, so that if you try to "starve" the cycle with chemo, they manage to survive.

Cancer cells might be addicted to autophagy, since this innate response may be a critical means by which the cells survive nutrient limitation and lack of oxygen commonly found within tumors. And, it is likely to explain how some cancer cells evade chemotherapies by using, essentially, a work around.

Apparently, the chloroquin blocks the ability of the cell to do this, so they are more likely to die from the chemo.

Still preliminary, of course.
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Fried food is bad for you: Some fats develop toxic aldehydes when they are reheated.
The oils that do this are the ones considered "heart safe" ones like sunflower oil, olive oil, and flaxseed oil.


Researchers from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU, Spain) have been the first to discover the presence of certain aldehydes in food, which are believed to be related to some neurodegenerative diseases and some types of cancer....
We use cheap locally made palm oil, which is supposed to be bad for cholesterol, but doesn't deteriorate in heat as much. Supposedly when used for cooking it has less toxic aldehyde than sunflower oil.

oh well...you have to die of something, and when you live in an area where the threats include earthquakes, terrorism and dengue fever, why worry.
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another study links BPA (in plastics) with heart disease.

Wouldn't it be ironic if we all ate expensive diets and exercized all the time only to find that the diet soda or bottled waters we drank was the cause of our obesity?

no, I'm on an icetea kick right now (trying to cut down on coffee drinking) and rarely use bottled water or sodapop.

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Non medical headline of the day:

'Faster than light' measurement blamed on loose cable


Read more here: http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2012/02/this-is-why-we-refused-to-allow-nuclear-physicists-to-hook-up-our-dvr.html#storylink=cpy

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