BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #56: Andes Mountains Plant Extract Inhibits Growth and Spread of Cancer Stem Cells!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: Damsin inhibits the growth and spread of cancer stem cells…

Environmental scientists say all the time that “cutting down the rain forests could easily destroy the next cure for cancer…”

The plant is related to a plant we have lots of here, asters – you know, the tiny, “daisy” looking plant? Found on the Great Plains in it its natural state and in most garden stores in the spring, it’s common here in the US. THIS plant, with no name but its scientific one, Ambrosia arborescens, is found in the Andes mountains from Columbia down to Bolivia. The local peoples use it as an aspirin, a Tylenol, and an antiseptic, so it wasn’t like it was unknown.

Turned out that used against breast cancer, it stops the growth of these things called cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells are highly resistant to chemotherapy because they are, in a way, not true cancer cells – it’s more like they’re FUTURE cancer cells.

In a way, these stem cells remind me of viruses. Viruses aren’t technically alive – specifically, they can’t make baby viruses without the help of another cell. Making babies is one of the BASIC definitions of living things (of course not ALL living things make babies! Within a species females can’t make babies without males; but given a viable egg and a sperm cell, Humans reproduce.) Viruses don’t make new viruses unless they invade a normal cell and take over its normal job, forcing it to make more viruses. THAT’S why “antibiotics” can’t kill viruses – because a virus isn’t alive, it can’t be killed. You might think of viruses as microscopic zombies…

Stem cells aren’t any specific kind of cancer cell – they’re a “generic” cancer cell – so chemotherapy designed to take out breast cancer cells doesn’t work, slides off the stem cells, which then go to a new place in the body (metastasizes) and turn into a breast cancer cell and begins to reproduce. This is where metastasized bone, lung, brain, and liver come from.

At any rate, the chemical that comes from the Ambrosia arborescens is called damsin (it can be made by Humans, too. When its artificial, it’s called ambrosin), and when used against cancer cells – at least in recent tests – both damsin and ambrosin “inhibit the division and mobility of the cancer cells. This means that the tumour becomes smaller as cell proliferation [cells dividing and growing] decreases.”

The research is only at the very beginning stages, BUT…if it continues to perform in animals and Humans the way it performs in the lab, this could lead to a new and better way to treat breast cancer!

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170927093304.htm

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Ambrosia_arborescens_%289095778995%29.jpg

ENCORE #71! – Metastatic Breast Cancer -- Lung Cancer

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry appeared on Christmas Eve in 2011.

Some fifteen years ago, my wife’s mother passed away from lung cancer.

A child of her times, she smoked often and heavily for a number of years while raising four children, then quit – long before I met her.

Diagnose with lung cancer in 1994, she took chemotherapy, went into remission and finally succumbed to the disease in (I think – and my wife will correct me!) 1997.

Her disease was DIFFERENT than the type of lung cancer that can flare up after a woman (or rarely a man) is treated initially for breast cancer. Lung cancer after breast cancer is most often caused by BREAST CANCER cells that have invaded other organs and therefore are called metastatic breast cancer. The word “metastatic” was used in the 1570s and comes from the Greek metastasis which means "transference, removal, change.” The roots are meta which means "over, across" plus the word histanai which means "to place, cause to stand.” The medical use for "shift of disease from one part of the body to another" dates from 1660s in English.

“Metastatic cancer to the lungs is the spread of cancer from another region of the body to the lungs. The place where cancer begins is called the primary cancer. For example, if breast cancer spreads to the lungs, it would be called breast cancer with metastasis (spread) to the lungs. In this case, breast cancer would be considered the ‘primary’ cancer.”

Symptoms that would lead doctors to believe that the breast cancer had metastasized to the lungs are similar to those of “regular” lung cancer and would be warning signs that a person would need to see their doctor as soon as possible. They include: a cough that persists over time, or does not go away with treatment; coughing up blood, difficulty breathing (due to decreased airflow by a tumor obstructing the large airways or spread through the lungs); wheezing (caused by the interference of airflow through an airway obstructed by a tumor); pain in the chest, back, shoulder, or arm (when a lung tumor presses on nerves around the lungs); repeated lung infections such as pneumonia or bronchitis; hoarseness; and lastly, lung cancer CAN have no apparent symptoms and only appear  when a chest x-ray is done for another reason.

As well, “general symptoms” of lung cancer can sometimes present with vague concerns such as fatigue, weight loss, loss of appetite, and even depression can be a symptom of lung cancer as well as many other conditions.

Treatment for cancer metastatic to the lungs is usually determined by the primary cancer, or origin of the cancer. Systemic therapy (chemotherapy, biological therapy, targeted therapy, hormonal therapy), local therapy – which might include surgery or radiation therapy), or a combination of these treatments. The choice of treatment generally depends on the size, location, and number of metastatic tumors; the patient’s age and general health; and the types of treatment the patient has had in the past.

References: http://lungcancer.about.com/od/symptomsoflungcance1/a/symptomslungca.htm, http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Sites-Types/metastatic

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg

GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…Alzheimer’s #10: Time Traveling With My Dad

Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s stayed hidden from everyone until I took over the medical administration of my parents in 2015. Once I found out, there was a deafening silence from most of the people I know even though virtually all of them would add, “My _____ had Alzheimer’s…” But there was little help, little beyond people sadly shaking heads. Or horror stories. Lots of those. Even the ones who knew about the disease seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Alzheimer’s Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this part of my blog…

I love the concept of time travel.

My favorite set of movies are the BACK TO THE FUTURE Trilogy.

My wife and I just spent the past week binge-watching Series 5 of DR. WHO.

STAR TREK (all of the series!) have great fun playing with time travel – doing some of the most impressive episodes of all time and introducing the entire Mirror Universe…

I LOVE TIME TRAVEL!!!!

However. Captain Kathryn Janeway in the Star Trek series, VOYAGER, had one of the most succinct criticisms of time travel I’ve ever heard. In the episode “Future’s End”, she says, “Time travel - from my first day on the job as captain, I swore that I would never let myself get caught up in one of these God-forsaken paradoxes. The future is the past, the past is the future...it all gives me a headache.”

I used to laugh at that, but since Dad starting sliding from Stage Four firmly into Stage Five of Alzheimer’s, her complaint has suddenly struck close to home.

Talking to Dad, I get headaches petty regularly these days. Dad’s mind slides from sometime in 1941 when he was just ten years old, to the present. There are moments when he forgets that my mom passed away (14 months ago now) only to remember that she did almost before the words leave his mouth.

He’ll call and ask where mom is…and after talking to him for a few minutes, I realize he’s talking about HIS mother. She died in 1954. Dad was only 23 and on leave from the Air Force because she was ill. His own father had died when he was sixteen.

In the previous 100 words, starting with “Talking to Dad…” you went from 2017 to 1941, back to 2017, then the middle of 2016 and onto 1954. That’s 70 years + 70 years + 1 year + 63 years, for a grand total of time travel years of 204 years.  

I’ll never know exactly how Dad felt either of those days because he just goes into a factual explanation about how his dad was napping while he was on the phone with some girl. After a while, Dad noticed that his father had stopped breathing. He gets even more factual and brief after that, ending with, “June took care of most of it.” June was my aunt. She was all of 29 when her mother died.

At any rate. The disease has made my father into a time traveler – a lost time traveler at that. While I’m still firmly rooted here, for him, he’s not unsure of what day or time it is, he has no real perception even of what year it is.

“For example, the perception of an ocean sunset combines a multitude of visual impressions; a vast color palette with numerous shapes (a round red sun, the line of the horizon, purple clouds of all shapes and sizes, etc.). But the experience is more than just visual. The sound of the waves and the gulls flying overhead. The smell and the taste of the salt water and the way the warm breeze feels against your face. You may be enjoying the moment with friends, and this also becomes a part of the overall experience, and of the memory.

“It is the hippocampus that sorts and compares these impressions (like the sunset) and creates a memory. Memories at this stage are short-term memories. The hippocampus then decides if a particular memory will be committed to long-term memory.

“So it is not surprising that forgetting a recent event (short-term memory) is one of the very first symptoms of this disease.”

OK – short term is scrambled so he forgets what happened yesterday. What about the skipping around?

“Patients with Alzheimer's disease…received tests of recall and recognition, word-completion priming, and incomplete-picture priming. [They] had impaired recall and recognition…[and] impaired word-completion priming. [They also] had intact incomplete-picture priming, a form of priming shown to be perceptual in normal subjects. These results provide…evidence for a dissociation between two components of repetition priming, perceptual priming…and nonperceptual priming... Preserverd perceptual priming in AD may be mediated by the occipital regions that are relatively spared in AD; compromised nonperceptual priming may be mediated by temporal regions that show dense neuropathological changes early in AD.”

In English? How about this: Based on tests that looked at , Alzheimer’s people have trouble remembering and recognizing things like pictures, words, and common sentences (Like, “See Jane run,” or pictures of places, people, or things). People can usually recognize words that are made up of words they already know – “airplane” for example, “air” and “plane”. They have more trouble with words they’re unfamiliar with, for example “Alzheimer’s”.

They also have trouble repeating actions unless they’re used to them. Another problem they run into is that there’s a weak connection with what’s happening “now” to Dad and what happened in the past. He’s experienced past events more often, so he remembers them. Current events aren’t attached to anything – except past events – Dad knows what it’s like for someone close to you to die. He remembers HIS mother dying. But not Mom dying and mentioning the current event sparks the past event. Ideas, language, and how he responds to various people in various situations – are damaged early on in Alzheimer’s.

So – Dad’s memories skip all over the place whenever something that’s happening “now” recalls something that happened “then”.

I still love time travel – I just hate watching my dad travel in time. It recalls to mind a STAR TREK: Deep Space 9 episode in which Captain Sisco’s son ages while the captain stays the same age and is snapped into his son’s life at different times. We’ll talk more about “The Visitor” next time and how it feels like what’s happening to Dad.

Resource: http://www.best-alzheimers-products.com/the-alzheimers-brain.html#prettyPhoto, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945213803255

Image:  http://az616578.vo.msecnd.net/files/2016/06/25/6360242025150255191939281878_Alzheimer-disease-patients.jpg

ENCORE #70! – Metastatic Breast Cancer: Bone Cancer

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry appeared in December of 2011 and I updated it in February of 2015.

We just got news this week that a “cancer friend” of ours had a bone scan, and after an extended time of treatment, she is cancer free!

But just what IS bone cancer and why did she get it?

The cancer, while it can certainly occur by itself, is what is called metastatic breast cancer. It happens when cancer cells from the breast escape into the blood stream or the lymph system and invade MORE new flesh.

While bone cancer is the most common – 70% of metastatic breast cancers are of this ilk – the other 30% is made up of brain cancer (10%) and lymph, lung and liver cancer. Let me emphasize here that these cancers are NOT the peculiar type of cancer cells that initiate these diseases in people who have never had breast cancer. These cancers are BREAST CANCER cells that have invaded other organs and therefore are called metastatic breast cancer. The word “metastatic” was used in the 1570s and comes from the Greek metastasis which means "transference, removal, change.” The roots are meta which means "over, across" plus the word histanai which means "to place, cause to stand.” The medical use for "shift of disease from one part of the body to another" dates from 1660s in English.

Bone cancer caused by the invasion of breast cancer cells into the bones can first show up as back, bone, or joint pain lasting more than two to three weeks that seems to be getting worse; numbness or weakness in a particular part of the body; a change in bowel or bladder activity, such as problems with incontinence or not being able to urinate or have a bowel movement. This may be a sign that the nerves in your backbone are getting pinched by the cancer.

As well, blood tests can reveal a buildup of calcium or tumor markers (special proteins in the blood) like CEA (carcino-embryonic antigen), CA (cancer antigen) 15-3 or CA 27-29 that suggest the cancer might be in the bones. Calcium build up might also show up in a routine bone scan. These tests are NOT usual and are typically ordered only if the symptoms appear.

Metastatic bone disease (MBD) caused by invading breast cancer often behaves in a “mixed osteolytic (destroys bone cells) and osteoblastic (causes abnormal growth of bone cells) manner”. Bone destroying or bone growing MBD occurs because the different cancer cells give off chemicals that interfere with the naturally occurring cells in the bone and cause bone destruction, new bone formation, or both. MBD weakens the affected bones, people with the disease are prone to fractures. Broken bones caused by MBD are termed "pathological fractures."

The most common treatment options for MBD include radiation and medications to control pain and prevent further spread of the disease, and surgery to stabilize bone that is weak or broken. By killing the cancer cells, radiation relieves pain, stops the tumor from growing and can prevent the bone from breaking. Radiation can also be used to control the cancer after surgery to fix a broken bone.

MBD is a systemic (body-wide) problem and radiation therapy may be use just to lessen symptoms and pain in more advanced cases, or to completely destroy disease in the affected bone.

Different cancers respond differently to radiation. Several types of radiation therapy are available. Local field radiation is the most common type of radiation used to treat MBD in which radiation is directed at the metastatic tumor and the immediate adjacent tissue. Entire bone segments or multiple bones can be targeted by local field radiation, depending upon how many areas are affected by the disease. This usually results in complete pain relief in 50% to 60% of cases and partial relief in more than 80% of cases. How well MBD responds to radiation depends on many things, including cancer type (for example, breast cancer typically responds very well to radiation, while kidney cancer does not), and where the tumor is located.

Pain usually begins to subside in the first 1 to 2 weeks, but maximum relief may take several months. Therefore, pain medication is prescribed throughout the radiation treatment course.

For our “cancer friend”, the treatment has been effective and with the pain greatly reduced, we are planning to actually meet for the very first time for dinner over the holiday season!

FEBRUARY 2014 UPDATE: Yesterday, this friend got a CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH!!! As of September 2017, she remains cancer-free!

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg

GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT #37…Lymphedema, Weight Loss, and Exercise

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Two days after my 60^th birthday, my wife and I joined Weight Watchers © and started to lose weight.

Four months later, we’re approaching our goals in weight loss – and we’ve changed our lifestyle drastically. Fast food is almost exclusively a thing of the past and what we DO have in the house is under tight control. For example, I have had a LARGE bag of Peanut M&Ms in the cabinet beside me writing table all summer. I have not opened it and my wife hasn’t even suggested it!

So, what does dieting and lifestyle change have to do with lymphedema?

Everything, apparently: “…body mass index was the variable most closely associated with arm lymphedema after breast cancer treatment, and that the greater the body mass index, the higher the frequency of lymphedema. The 5-year incidence of lymphedema in women with breast cancer with a body mass index greater than 29 was 36 percent, compared with 12 percent for patients with lower body mass indexes…the majority of studies linking elevated body mass index with an increased risk of developing secondary lymphedema have involved the upper extremity following breast cancer treatment...”

So initial body weight – and guys, I’m TALKIN’ TO YOU, TOO! – goes hand-in-hand with lymphedema struggles. What can WE do, brethren?

First of all, we have to get up off of our fat asses. Sorry, there ain’t no sweeter way to put it. If you think the lymphedema is “her issue” for even one second, then you’ve never been more wrong. If she has lymphedema, then you have lymphedema. I’ve spent way too much time thinking I could be supportive and all that, but losing weight and getting healthier wasn’t on the list of things to do – more likely “wining and dining” was close to the top, right near watching movies together.

It recently occurred to me (actually, it hit me like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgatNovoAnI) that I’ve been blithely walking alongside my wife and not doing much of anything significant. So, when she asked me to do WW with her, I jumped (finally) at the chance to support her.

The end result is that I’ve lost weight, she’s lost weight…but now we’re stalled. What’s next? After doing some research on it, I found this: “…the group lifting weights experienced fewer flare-ups than the women who protected their arms. Researchers deduced that arm muscle contractions may help move lymph fluid back to veins in the armpit and neck areas thereby forcing the body to recirculate the fluid. This, in turn, alleviated swelling and discomfort.”

So – next step is to start to lift small weights. I don’t mean “pumping iron”! But using small weights to regain muscle mass lost (for me) and increasing the lymph circulation for her.

Ready? Set. GO!

Resource: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393748/, http://www.curetoday.com/community/bonnie-annis/2017/06/could-weightlifting-be-beneficial-for-those-with-lymphedema

Image: http://wrex.images.worldnow.com/images/23784252_SA.jpg