Hanging out

October 5, 2008 / / 2 Comments

I don’t have any interesting news to blog about these days…just family reunion stuff. My sister was here when my parents and I arrived from Italy last Wednesday, and my niece arrived two days ago from Arizona, where she and my sister live, so yesterday we all got together for the first time in years. Lots of laughing, horsing around and teasing, as though we had never been apart.

I also got clobbered twice at Scrabble, as expected, but I didn’t do as badly as I thought I would…in fact, at one point I was ahead (my niece was very upset, hehe)…but then she came up with a 7-letter word. Eh! She and my sister know all the cute Scrabble tricks, I still have to learn…

I am staying at my parents’ house on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Cape, as we call it, is a lovely peninsula about an hour and a half’s drive south of Boston. I was born on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Cape Cod. As I think I have mentioned here before, when I was six years old my parents moved to Florence, Italy, where I grew up (I went through the Italian public school system, including a couple of years at the University of Florence).

Anyway, when I was in my early 20s, I returned to the U.S. and went to college in Cambridge, MA. And I lived and worked in Boston after graduating. So I have strong ties to this area and know it well. Very pretty here at this time of year. I will be taking photos but not publishing them (probably!) until I return to Italy two weeks from now, because I don’t know how to upload photos onto my mother’s computer, a Mac, and, quite frankly, I don’t want to waste my precious time here learning how to do that.

So these are lazy days, spent visiting with my family, watching U.S. television, reading and going shopping (clothes are sooo cheap here compared to Italy!). And today I want to go take a walk on the beach…the Cape has some really stunning beaches. And myeloma? Forgotten, except when I check my blog. Mmmh, sometimes it’s nice to be forgetful…!

Huh?

October 4, 2008 / / 1 Comment

I know I have been obsessing a bit, ok, a LOT, about the recent VP debate, but I am absolutely infuriated that Sarah Palin was allowed to get away with so many false statements (see La Cootina’s blog for a big one!) and accusations. And with NOT answering questions. Outrageous.

And since when has one of the qualifications for being VP been: don’t say anything TOO STUPID during the one and only VP debate before the election? In my view, this is simply apPALINg.

And here is some more appalling stuff. Take a look at the following excerpt from the VP debate transcript. I randomly chose a couple of sentences pronounced by Sarah Palin:

I think tomorrow morning, the pundits are going to start do the who said what at what time and we’ll have proof of some of this, but again, John McCain knows how to win a war. Who’s been there and he’s faced challenges and he knows what evil is and knows what it takes to overcome the challenges here with our military. Two sentences later, she says, He’ll know how to win a war.

Huh?

Setting aside the syntactical gibberish, all this “war winning” nonsense is frightening to me…and reminds me of another issue mentioned almost en passant by Joe Biden during the debate, i.e., that McCain wouldn’t even meet with a close NATO ally: Spain. SPAIN? That really stuck in my mind…at the time, I thought Biden must be wrong.

Well, this morning I looked it up. During a September 18 radio interview, McCain was asked if he would meet with Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero and invite him to the White House. In a nutshell (you can listen to the entire interview on YouTube), the GOP candidate responded vaguely that he would be willing to meet with those leaders who are “our friends” but added that he would stand up to leaders who “wish to harm us.” The implication was that Prime Minister Zapatero was among the latter. This bit of news was not well-received in Spain, as you can imagine. Hmmm, and I thought that McCain’s strong point was foreign policy. That may well be, but one thing seems obvious: the word “diplomacy” is not in McCain’s vocabulary.

All this warmongering talk and hollow patriotic rhetoric gives me the heebie jeebies.

Enough!, I say.

IgE and survival

September 29, 2008 / / 13 Comments

A blog reader, thank you!, sent me a 2007 study on IgE written by an Italian research team. The full study is available here: http://tinyurl.com/4do9nx.

Intriguing, I must say. As a myeloma patient, you tend to read mostly about IgG (my type of myeloma), IgA and IgM…but not much about the other immunoglobulins. I looked up IgE and found that it triggers our body’s response to allergens such as cat dander, dust mites and pollen, and it also protects us from parasitic worms.

Well, I’d never even thought of having my IgE levels tested, so I was particularly interested in this study. The “Discussion” part tells us that This is the first study reporting polyclonal IgE levels in a large series of MGUS subjects and MM patients. To the best of our knowledge, it is also the first study reporting an association between IgE levels and Hb, and, even more interestingly, between IgE levels and survival in patients with hematologic malignancies. (“Hb” stands for haemoglobin, by the way.)

IgE levels are connected to survival? Well, well. Let’s keep reading.

The Italian researchers checked IgE levels in a large number of myeloma patients and MGUS folks and compared the results to a control group in order to determine survival and prognostic factors. They found that IgE levels progressively decreased from controls to MGUS and from MGUS to MM. And patients with high IgE levels lived 2 to 3 years longer than those with low or intermediate levels.

They concluded that high IgE levels are positive predictors of overall survival (P = 0.03 and 0.08,respectively) and strongly correlated with hemoglobin values.

Problem is, though, that total IgE levels are highly variable in general population, depending on many factors, such as age, gender, race, atopy, genetics, immune status, season of the year, tobacco smoke, and concomitant diseases. Further on we read that the Ranges of normal IgE levels are very variable, and no consensus among laboratories has been reached to define normal and pathologic values. Okay, so that could be a reason why IgE has not been taken into consideration in myeloma patients…until now, at any rate.

Another interesting finding: IgE is connected to haemoglobin (Hb) and Beta-2 microglobulin (B2M) levels. The researchers found that a high IgE meant a higher Hb and a lower B2M, and this in turn meant a better prognosisl.

In the Discussion part we find the following titbit: The positive association between IgE levels and survival can be interpreted as an indication that (a) the immune system of MM patients with higher IgE levels is less deteriorated […]. Ah.

At any rate, because IgE is an antibody connected to allergy response, the possibility that myeloma patients with allergies such as asthma would be more protected than others in terms of disease progression really (!) got my attention since I suffer periodically from bad attacks of asthma (these attacks have returned, by the way, but I think it’s just because of the change in season from hot to chilly) and other allergic reactions. Hmmm, I thought for a second, have I finally discovered something positive about having asthma and rosacea??? Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed when I read that it is unlikely that allergies play a protective role in myeloma. Bummer!

This study is particularly interesting because for the first time ever a group of researchers has found a connection between IgE levels and survival prognosis. The higher those levels, the better off you are. I wonder if I could have my IgE levels tested…just out of curiosity. Or…on second thought…do I really want to know…???