Big Bugaboo of Sugar

Sugar feeds cancer? Or it doesn't. Even if you manage to avoid sugar (fruit counts), cancer cells will feed on something else. You'd have to starve yourself to starve cancer and then you'd suffer anyway.

http://curecancer73-don.blogspot.com/2012/12/cancer-feeds-on-sugar-acidic-cells-get.html

But what is the truth?Is there such a thing?

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/patient1/Patient-1-Eating-to-live-longer.html

I touched on the “cancer diet” in a previous post, but for posterity and those too busy to go read about vegetables, it breaks down like this – with the help of a nutritionist friend, I am on a pretty strict diet that features raw (and some cooked) veggies, limited fruit, some fish, lots of beans, a little egg, some nuts, and oh yea, more veggies.  Gone from the pantry – animal meat, all dairy (giving up yogurt was tough), almost all processed foods, and sugar.  Not just refined sugar, but really anything that spikes your blood sugar – hence the limited fruits.  Her words to me were: “sugar feeds cancer.”

I had a visit with my naturopath at Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center and I will indeed not be eating sugar. Or even dairy, once I get through the yogurt I just bought. He wants me to challenge dairy: stop dairy for at least two weeks and then eat a lot of it. Gladly! The Primal diet includes a lot of meat but I don't know that much about it yet. So much to read!

Is Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma famous enough?

Understandably, the general public is not aware of lymphoma and many do not know what it is.   Those who know, will believe it is something that happens to someone else. I know that I did not give it a moment's thought until 1996. ~ Karl Schwartz



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/disease-and-the-public-eye.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

Disease and the Public Eye, NYT, 5/19/13
"I’ve spent a lot of time since my diagnosis wondering how we learn about certain diseases, and why some become part of the public conversation while others (like dystonia) do not. It’s odd to find yourself envying people who have diseases that get more attention than yours. But I can’t help it."

Eat More Carbs

Low Carb Diet linked to non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma? I found an article almost ten years ago saying that a low carb diet might be linked to the rise of lymphoma. How can that be?


March 9, 2004 -- What's causing America's huge surge in blood cancer? It might be our diet. It's called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It's a killer collection of different white-blood-cell cancers. And it's a mystery why it's been increasing so quickly in the U.S. and other parts of the world.


Now there's a clue. It comes from a study of 601 Connecticut women with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Tongzhang Zheng, ScD, head of the division of environmental health sciences at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn., collected detailed dietary information from these women and from 717 similar women without cancer.


"What we found is if a person has a higher intake of animal protein, they will have a higher risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma," Zheng tells Web. "And people who have a higher intake of saturated fat have an increased risk. On the other hand, if you have higher-than-average intake of dietary fiber -- particularly if you frequently eat vegetables and fruits with a high fiber content -- you have a reduced risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma."


The findings appear in the March 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.


Earlier studies hinted at the same thing. Now, Zheng says, it seems clear that a major factor in the mysterious rise of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a diet high in meat, saturated fats, dairy products, and eggs and low in fiber, fruits, and vegetables.


Unbalanced Diet, Unhealthy Body


In the U.S., three kinds of cancer have skyrocketed in recent decades. One is lung cancer, mainly caused by smoking. Another is skin cancer, caused by too much sun. The third is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But nobody knows why it's on the rise, says Nancy Mueller [pronounced MULL-er], ScD, associate director of population sciences at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Center.


"Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a basket of related diseases," Mueller tells WebMD. "It probably has a set of causal factors that may be related to one another, but not in a simple way. We can't really explain it -- this is a really hard nut to crack. But what is happening to the American is associated with a number of malignancies such as breast, kidney, and colon cancer. Higher body weight is a common theme." 
http://forum.lowcarber.org/archive/index.php/t-171868.html

There are some hilarious rebuttals, including how the loss of the ozone layer is caused by low carb diets. Seems just as likely to the writer of the comment.

Acronyms for Lymphoma Land

Abbreviations for Lymphoma

AE - Adverse Events

ASH - American Society of Hemotology

BMT - Bone Marrow Transplant (same as SCT)

CHOP - Mixture of Chemotherapy for LDBCL

CR - Complete Response

CT Scan - Computed Tomography Scan

CVP - Mixture of Chemotherapy for FL

CVP-R and CHOP-R - Chemotherapy with Rituxan

FL - Follicular Lymphoma

FLIPI - Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index

GVHD - Graft Versus Host Disease

HCT - Hematocrit

HGB - Hemoglobin

LDBCL - Large Diffuse B-Cell Lymphoma

LYM - Lymphocytes

MAB - Monoclonal Antibody (Rituxan is one of these)

MCHC - Mean Cell Hemoglobin Concentration

MCV - Red Blood Mean Cell Volume

NO2 - Nitrite (found in processed meat packages)

ORR - Overall Response Rate

OS - Overall Survival

PFS - Progression Free Survival

PLT - Platelet Count

PR - Partial Response

RBC - Red Blood Count

SAE - Serious Adverse Events

SCT - Stem Cell Transplant

TTNT - Time to Next Therapy

TTP - Time to Tumor Progression

WBC - White Blood Count

How does rituximab work?

How does rituximab work? No one knows for sure (much like the IUD)!

This is from Ben Townsend's blog or so I'm guessing:

Rituximab (also known as Rituxan) is emerging as the frontline treatment of Follicular Lymphoma. I have attempted to understand this drug and how it works. It is called a Monoclonal Antibody (thus the “-mab” of Rituximab). Somehow it attaches itself to a cancer cell and causes that cell to be destroyed. The testing at present is attempting to show that the “watchful waiting” until the Lymphoma grows may be a thing of the past. Clinical trials are showing that starting off with Rituximab every two months for a few years keeps the Cancer at bay for approximately 7 to 8 years, much longer than any other treatment has done in the past. This is known as treating the Lymphoma “asymptomatic” (before any symptoms show up). The side effects of Rituximab are much less that Chemotherapy. However, sometimes Rituximab is used in conjunction with Chemotherapy. My Oncologist, the brilliant Dr. Kosinski, told me that adding the Chemotherapy causes the Rituximab to have a 90% effect on the Cancer cells, while the Rituximab alone offers a 60% effect.
Still, it is not known exactly how the Rituximab causes the destruction (a process called “Lysis”) of the Cancer cell. It may cause the cell to be destroyed one of three ways or more.

1. The first way is Apoptosis, which causes the Cancer cell to induce it’s own death (kind of like suicide).
2. The second way is called Antibody-dependent Cell-mediated Cytotoxicity (ADCC), where the NK (Natural Killer) cells send a signal to the target cell, causing it to die.
3. Third, a Complement-dependent Cytoxicity (CDC) which is where holes are punched into the Cancer cell, causing that cell’s death. Also, Rituximab sends a signal to the Cancer cell to stop dividing. All we really do know is that the Rituximab attaches itself to a strand that comes out of the Cancer cell known as the “CD20 Protein.” This long strand loops out of the cell and then back into the cell.

The following pictures shows the portion of the cell that has the CD 20 Protein on it.

http://drbentownsend.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/rituximab-treatment/

What we do know is that this stuff is expensive: Rituxan is costly. It costs about $10,000.00 a treatment, which is simply getting an IV bag of saline with about 750 milligrams of Rituxan in it. 750 mg is equal to about 25 ounces.  The normal Rituxan treatment is one IV every two months for two years, or 12 treatments.

Causation

This is the first explanation of a possible cause of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that makes sense to me: 

"If you have celiac disease, you also likely have a higher-than-normal risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. If you have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, at least one study has shown that you, too, may have a higher risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, the evidence is far less clear for those with gluten sensitivity.
It's not clear exactly how many people with celiac disease will develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma over their lifetimes. One study — which looked at the incidence of lymphoma and similar disorders at the Columbia University Celiac Disease Center — found 40 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma out of 1,285 celiac patients seen at the center between 1981 and 2010, for a rate of 3.1 percent."*

A gluten free diet does not even help people with "refractory celiac disease"! That's news to me.

So although I haven't ever been diagnosed with celiac, I do seem to have gluten sensitivity. But isn't driving through smog choked Elizabeth, N.J. (on the way to see grandma) more lethal than years of eating gluten?

*http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/commoncomplicationsofcd/a/Celiac-Disease-Lymphoma.htm

Treatment after all

The second oncologist I saw just today at the Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center wants me to get 6-8 weeks of the drug rituximub (gotta learn to spell it!). So that was a shock. I am getting more blood tests and then will decide. Look up the possible side effects of this "miracle" drug and it's scary. At least it doesn't include hair loss!

Basically he disagreed that it was all indolent. Dr Chen thinks some of it may be more aggressive and we can head off a worse outcome.

For today I am starting taking reishi (mushroom) capsules as recommended by the naturopath and will fast tomorrow for a lipids blood test.

Glad I'm part time: more time to see medical people

I'm going to see another oncologist on Tuesday and a naturopath. They work together. That sounds smart though I will be curious what form that takes.

How many doctors can one person see? No, it's not a tongue twister like How much Wood Can a Woodchuck chuck, etc.

It amazes me that my insurance will cover me almost completely for a diagnosis like this but will not pay for orthotics or a TMJ night guard.

As far as alternative medicine, I don't think I can eat blue cheese at night like Robert Miller suggests. It is not good for people who tend to get GERD (me) and the kind I got about choked me. Pick and choose, wait and see...

Results of PET scan

So the results of the PET scan were relatively benign: some small lymph nodes, only slightly enlarged, in my neck and chest, only 1.5 cm instead of one cm.

It is a relief, yes.  But the technologist at the radiology clinic said don't be alarmed if you have to come back in right away, it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad. What? She was unbearably cheerful! Why did she say "thank you" every time she left the room?

And the oncologist wants to see me back in four months. That seems so soon. If I've had this for ten years, why do another scan in such a short time?

He also was predictably dismissive of Miller and naturopathy, So I am determined to do as much as I can of the recommendations of Miller--walnuts, berries, Vitamin D, etc. because I do believe it is the right path. And healthier is always better. It's only common sense!