March 2025 – Margaret's Corner

A recently published Italian study (yaaay!) in MedPress Oncology just popped under my one eye, no pun intended…well, okay, intended, hehe. Very interesting. Here’s the link: https://medpresspublications.com/articles/oroa/mpo-202501001.pdf

The author lists a bunch of the supplements that are very familiar to us by now, such as curcumin (first and foremost) as well as methods (yoga, e.g.) that could be helpful in treating haematological cancers. Indeed.

While Professor Bonucci notes that “further clinical studies must be carried out before these methods can be considered as recommendations for use in the course of haematological pathology,” in the Discussion part he also writes that “These approaches, supported by clinical evidence, can not only help to control disease but also improve response to conventional treatments, providing a more holistic approach to patient care.”

Bingo. There you go. I’ve been saying this for years. Years!

Okay, I have to rest my eye now. Ooooh, I can’t wait for my second cataract to be removed, so I can be done with all this (eye strain headaches, e.g.) and finally return to seeing properly again…and with 20/20 vision! Wowsie!

Take care, everyone! I hope you enjoy reading this study. Ciaoooo!

I’m baaaack!!! Well, no…just sort of. I’m actually typing while using only one eye, my unoperated eye, to be precise. Long, boring story, ho hum, but even though my operated eye is doing extremely well, I won’t really be able to do much with it until I have my second surgery. And so right now I am wearing my old glasses with a pirate eye patch over my new eye, otherwise my vision gets all blurry…headache…etc. This should explain why I won’t be writing a long, rambling post… hehe.

I’m writing today not to talk about my eye but to tell you about a very interesting Indonesian study that I noticed this morning. Here’s the link to the full study, which I will be able to read in full next month: https://caspjim.com/article-1-4177-en.pdf

I managed to read the first part, so here’s the essence. There were two groups of myeloma patients in the study: one group took melphalan, prednisone, and a placebo, the other took melphalan, prednisone, and, tada!, 8 grams of curcumin. And guess what?

After 28 days, the curcumin group had higher levels of serum adiponectin. No idea what that meant, so I looked it up, figuring it was a good thing. And it is. By the way, in case you don’t know, adipose tissue is body fat.

As you can read in the introduction, “Adipose tissue secretes a protein called adiponectin, which has several beneficial effects on the body, including insulin sensitization, anti-inflammatory, anti-atherogenic, pro-apoptotic, and anti-proliferative. A reduction of serum adiponectin levels is associated with the progression of MGUS to myeloma, Adiponectin levels decrease approximately 16-20% among individuals with smoldering myeloma and myeloma compared to healthy adults.”

Therefore, reduced levels of adiponectin “may be associated with progression to myeloma.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this to be fabbbbbulous news, even though the two groups were rather small.

Anyway, I have used my eye enough for the day, so I am going to go rest it while waiting for Stefano to get home from work. I hope you are all fine and dandy! Keep smoldering! Ciao!