Today I came across some rather curious results (I’m trying not to say “interesting results” all the time… 😉 ) of a UC Berkeley study, which I just had to share with you: being exposed to art, music, and nature apparently gives a boost to the immune system. And, more interestingly for us, activities such as admiring Botticelli’s “Primavera” (or “Allegory of Spring”), see photo, or listening to Mozart or taking a walk in nature appear to lower the serum levels of interleukin-6, or IL-6 for short. A brief reminder: IL-6 is an important growth factor for myeloma cells, about which I’ve written heaps of posts, so I won’t go over it again (if you’ve never heard of it, just do a search of my blog for IL-6).

Here’s the Telegraph article discussing the findings of this study: http://goo.gl/Vw5Yzu

What I’d like to see next would be a study testing these three activities on a bunch of myeloma patients at various stages. Now wouldn’t THAT be amazingly interesting? 🙂 In the meantime, while I’m waiting for that study to take place (hah!), I’ll go for a walk in the park while listening to Mozart on my iPod, on my way to the Uffizi Gallery to check out Botticelli’s beautiful paintings (I love Botticelli!).
Oh, and while I’m walking, I’ll have to remember to strike some yoga poses, too (yoga reduces IL-6 levels, too…see the post I wrote on January 15, 2010). And…

Well, okay, I’m getting a bit too silly. 😉 But hey, we have absolutely NOTHING to lose here. There can be no toxic side effects to listening to music or admiring a work of art. The effects can only be positive. So why not give it a try?

Now, where’s my iPod?

Not that it really matters, but, for the record!, I’ve never smoked anything – cigarettes or marijuana or anything else for that matter. So I wasn’t that interested in or paying much attention to medical marijuana…until August of 2013, when I watched Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN “Weed” documentary on the use of medical marijuana. Cannabis suddenly became an interesting blip on my radar.

I mean, how could you NOT be affected by Charlotte’s story, for example? In “Weed,” Charlotte is the little girl who used to have 1200 seizures a month. After her parents began giving her medical marijuana, that number went down to 2 or 3 a month. Unbelievable, simply unbelievable. For those interested, here is a good CNN article about Dr. Gupta’s change of heart: http://goo.gl/lYjlJK

A blog reader who lives in Malaysia and was diagnosed with multiple myeloma more than ten years ago, at the age of 36, wrote to me in September 2014 about her use of hemp oil and how much it has helped her overcome her fatigue and bone pain. In her message, she reported feeling more relaxed and energetic thanks to the hemp oil.

She hasn’t been the only one to have gotten in touch with me. And so, two years (!) after watching “Weed,” I have finally decided to finish editing the post I began writing on this topic a rather long time ago. Let’s begin…

Last year I read a very interesting but complicated ITALIAN study on myeloma and cannabidiol, which is one of the active components of cannabis, the plant from which marijuana is made. (Note: CBD will not get you “high.”) You can find the abstract here: http://goo.gl/gSo7GD.

The full study, which I managed to get my hands on about a year ago, is quite complex and took me some time to decipher. The good news is that the full study is now available for FREE online, so you can download/read the entire shebang here: http://goo.gl/8r6Fj2. This makes my task much easier…Since the study can now be read for free, I can, er, freely discuss it without fear of breaking any copyright laws.

But for today I don’t want to go into too many details. I want to concentrate only on the abstract, which states that cannabidiol (CBD), both in combination with bortezomib (BORT) but also by itself, “strongly inhibited growth, arrested cell cycle progression and induced” the death of myeloma cells.” Wonderful, no? I mean, cannabidiol killed myeloma cells even when tested on its own, without the bortezomib…

This group of Italian researchers also discovered that cannobidiol “may help sidestep the problem of patients developing resistance to bortezomib.” So, more fantastic news.

Conclusion: cannabidiol “seems to help” proteasome inhibitors such as bortezomib in the treatment of myeloma.

Interesting aside. There are currently four clinical “Graft Versus Host Disease” (GVHD) trials testing cannabidiol. The patients in these trials have undergone an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (using the stem cells from a healthy donor, in a nutshell). The idea is to see if GVHD can be prevented and/or treated with CBD. I should add that only one trial is currently recruiting patients. If interested, all you need to do is go to clinicaltrials.gov and type “cannabidiol AND allogeneic” in the search box. No, apart from the GVHD trials, there are none testing CBD on myeloma patients. Not yet. But I bet it will happen at some point…It SHOULD happen…

Okay, at this point you’re probably wondering why it took me so bloody long to write such a brief, simple post. Well, if I had stopped at the abstract, you’d be absolutely right. But I didn’t. I wanted to understand what was going on, and why this ion channel process is so important in myeloma.

And so I studied how ion channels work, what the TRVP family is, and so on. It took me a while to figure it all out and put it in easy-to-understand language. When I read studies such as this one, sometimes I get really frustrated and give up for a while…or even for a long time…or…forever! 😉 This is not my field of expertise, after all (my Ph.D. is in linguistics, nothing to do with science…). Besides, hey, I do have a normal, busy life, and, to be honest, if I have some spare time I’d rather go play cards with my girlfriends or go out to dinner with Stefano…

That said, after TWO years, I’m finally close to finishing my more technical post on this topic…

So…stay tuned! I’m sure you can’t wait to read about all this stuff, eh? 😉

I’ve written at least one post about the dangers of media hype, screaming headlines, etc. This is the one I remember writing, but there may be others: http://margaret.healthblogs.org/2010/12/01/holy-cats-holy-cats-holy-cats-this-is-bloody-amazing/

How many times have I read the sentence “a cure for myeloma is around the corner!!!!!!!!”? Too many to count. Not surprisingly, it’s often used for fundraising purposes. I used to be a major donor fundraiser for a non profit organization, so I know how that system works. Anyway, that’s not the point today…

The point is that this is the first time (as far as I can recall, that is) I’ve read an article about the dangers of media hype. It was published in Healthday just a few days ago: https://goo.gl/qQL1gN Very interesting read.

Recommended!

I’ve written a bunch of posts on the link between vitamin D deficiency and icky happenings in myeloma. Ever since my SMM friend “Sherlock” talked to me about the importance of taking vitamin D, in fact, I’ve been “obsessed” with it, especially after reading, and writing a post about, the 2009 Mayo study on vitamin D and myeloma folks (click here to read the full Mayo study: http://goo.gl/qfO9Bp)

I take vitamin D every morning. It’s important for so many reasons, many of which I’ve written about here on the blog. For more information on vitamin D or any other topic, for that matter, you can do a search of my blog using the handy Search Box on the right-hand side of the homepage.

So why am I picking up this topic again today? Because, thanks to Frank’s post on Facebook, I just finished reading the abstract of a 2015 German study on, you guessed it!, the importance of vitamin D for myeloma patients: http://goo.gl/5InpVM

Important excerpt: “We found a widespread and alarming rate of vitamin D deficiency in patients with metastatic bone disease and multiple myeloma.”

Well, it seems crystal clear (once again!) that the vitamin D test should be added to our routine series of blood tests. And we NEED to act quickly if we see signs of a deficiency, by asking our doctors to recommend a good vitamin D supplement.

For our health! 🙂

Very busy period, this one. Apart from our usual activities, we’ve had quite a bit of work done on the house, maintenance work that began back in July, got paused for the three-week holiday period in August, then restarted in September. But we’re done now, fingers crossed.

And so the cleanup begins. I spent hours yesterday scrubbing and re-scrubbing, and then re-re-re-re-scrubbing!, our terraces, e.g….cement dust and filth everywhere…Mamma mia, never seen anything like it…It will take a while to get the house back in shape, I’m afraid.

Result: I’ve had no time to do any research, as you can imagine….but as soon as things quiet down and get back to normal, I will get back to posting. And that is a promise. 

In the meantime, I want to give you the link to a hilarious (IMO) video by “Simon’s Cat.” As you (probably) know, Stefano and I have SEVEN cats, yes, seven!, and they all hate, HAAAAAAATE!, the cat carrier. So whenever one of them has to go to the vet, we have to be as sneaky as snakes in the grass. One trick we’ve learned is never EVER let them see the cat carrier until the last second…But somehow…they KNOW. Even the slightest rattle from the carrier is enough to send them into hiding, and then you have to hunt them down, all over the house.

And that is why this video about Simon’s cat and the cat carrier made me laugh out loud. I hope you will enjoy it, too: https://goo.gl/c3jrS7 🙂

P.S. This is a photo of our eldest cat, Puzzola, putting her nose on the camera lens just as I was trying to take a photo of her. Typical. 🙂

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted anything on my blog for MORE than a MONTH. That’s never happened, methinks. Yikes.

Well, basically, in a nutshell, I took a holiday from my eloma. Oh, sorry, from my myeloma. 😉 In the past four weeks, I’ve barely given a thought to it. Can’t say I’ve missed it, either! 🙂

Stefano and I spent three of those four weeks with my parents on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA. We had a quiet holiday and didn’t do much in terms of sightseeing, but we did do one fabulous thing: we hired a private charter to go whale watching off the coast of Provincetown. We’d never done anything like that, mainly because of the cost…We’d always gone whale watching with the Dolphin Fleet, which I highly recommend since you learn a lot about these magnificent creatures, the whales. And of course we strongly support the type of research done by the Dolphin scientists…But there are a few drawbacks to going on such big boats–mainly, they’re always crowded, which makes it difficult to get decent photos. Another thing that I hadn’t considered before is the noise made not just by the above-mentioned crowds (kids screeching with excitement, e.g.) but by the boat’s motors. Those powerful motors make a lot of noise, let me tell ya…

Our private charter was worth every single penny. It was fantastic to be seated on a small boat, almost at the level of the whales, and take photos without anyone in front of us. And…tada!…no noise. The captain of our boat kept the engines at a minimum whenever we were near the whales, so the only noises we heard were the whales expelling air through their blowholes and the rippling sound of the waves around us. Unbelievable. Magical…

We mainly saw humpback whales, including three mamas with their calves (see photo no. 1). We also saw a few minke whales from afar and a couple of fin whales (the second largest living mammal…), which was a big treat…

And we saw tons of shearwaters and other sea birds. That was a big bonus for Stefano and me…and for our cameras. I haven’t been through my hundreds of photos yet, because ever since we’ve returned to Florence, I’ve had a zillion things to do, busy busy busy all day every day!, but here are a few photos, which I hope will give you an idea of the magic we experienced…

Speaking of things to do, I must rush off now. But I did want to say that all is well. I’m feeling and doing splendidly…Okay, must dash…Take care, everyone!!! Ciao!!! 🙂

Well, after a long, tiring, and record-breaking boiling hot July–the hottest on record, apparently, in the past 150 years!–Stefano and I are finally leaving tomorrow for the U.S. to visit my parents. Can’t wait!!! 😀

While we are gone, our cats will be surrounded by an army of caregivers, including my next door neighbors who will be checking in on them at least once a day, plus our regular cat/house sitter AND our vet who will keep on administering IVs to Piccolo, my 12-year-old male cat with chronic kidney disease (he’s doing so well, I am thankful to report…!). The kitties will end up having more company and entertainment than when we’re around!

I would like to apologize for not having written any research posts lately. I have some studies on my desktop that I have been intending to read and comment on, but the horrendous heat (see above) has turned my brain into mushy oatmeal, so any serious research will have to wait for cooler temperatures.

Before rushing off on the last-minute errands I need to do today, I would like to wish you all a wonderful, relaxing, and fun month of August…I will be checking my blog every day, of course…but I probably won’t be writing any posts or answering any messages (but I’ll try to read all of them!)…So, take care, everyone! Ciaooooooo!

I have been absolutely shocked and outraged for days over the killing of Cecil the lion by a dentist, a so-called “trophy” hunter from Minnesota, a man who already has a felony record in connection with the illegal killing of a black bear in Wisconsin back in 2006…

I don’t think I need to go into any details, since in the past few days this dentist-lion story has been all over the news (even here in Italy) and social media…

But I do feel the need to write a post about it. My outrage needs an outlet, and my blog is a clear choice for that, even though this story has nothing to do with myeloma. So here goes.

Something clearly needs to be done. Lions may well be EXTINCT by the year 2050…and that isn’t too far from now. Indeed, scientists predict that many of the species that are currently targets of these so-called “trophy” hunters will be extinct three generations from now.

Extinct. In just three generations. WHY???

I’m not asking for Walter Palmer’s head on a platter as others have done on social media. Or for the head of any other “trophy” hunter, for that matter. Reacting with violence puts us on the same level as these sick folks.

However, the nincompoop Minnesotan dentist needs to be punished in some way AND, most importantly, he must be stopped from killing animals, any animals!, in the future. Perhaps, like Cecil, he could be fitted with a GPS collar or ankle bracelet to ensure he never harms an animal again. Anyone who enjoys tracking a wounded lion for 40 hours, shooting it, then beheading and skinning it, while attempting to destroy its GPS collar so as not to get caught (and then, when he gets caught, says he is “sorry”??? Hello??? That does not correspond to the definition of “sorry” in my book!), is someone who should be kept as far away as possible from any sort of weapon.

And perhaps someday, with some form of rehabilitation (a few suggestions: working, under strict supervision, in a national park; joining anti-poaching teams all over the world, at his own expense, of course; donating huge sums of money to the Oxford University project that was studying Cecil, and so on…), this dentist might be brought to realize all the harm he has done in his life thus far. He might even reach out to pick up a camera instead of a crossbow. That wouldn’t bring back Cecil or the countless other animals that have been victims of all the unbelievably stupid “trophy” hunters, but…but it’s a start.

And things in fact seem to be moving in that direction now, so I can only hope that Cecil’s death will mark the beginning of the end of senseless, cruel, and ILLEGAL “trophy” hunting.

Shoot photos, not bullets!!!!!! No more illegal poaching!!!!!

And now for a couple of links…

Jimmy Kimmel’s perfect thoughts on this story: https://goo.gl/HSW4vC (For the record, I agree with everything he says, except for the bit about hunting. Hunting “because it’s part of your culture or something” is also abhorrent, IMO…see the yearly cruel pilot whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands, e.g.).

There are many petitions you can sign online. Here is one of them: https://goo.gl/KWqqM8

The Oxford University project’s website: www.wildcru.org  In case you have any extra money lying around…