State & Lake

Coping with Lyme disease:  Local victims hope to warn others to take precautions — Three generations of a Jack Tobichuk’s Foxboro family have been stricken with Lyme disease. And Foxboro police officer Doug Miller is quietly suffering with late-stage Lyme. After a five-day hospitalization in Boston, Miller, 58, is hooked up at home to a [...]

Cell Receptor Identified As Target For Anti-inflammatory Immune Response — Researchers at The Rockefeller University found that a receptor known to shield HIV and Hepatitis C from an effective immune response is also essential to the therapeutic effects of a common anti-inflammatory drug, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). The finding opens up new possibilities for developing drugs [...]

Wow, my last post was supposed to be this post but somehow I ended up on another topic altogether.  Well, moving on.
HealthNews Blog has a great article on stress entitled “Stress: How It Affects Us” by Joel Nathan.  It’s a great article because Nathan talks about how stress can adversely affect your health and I [...]

Toxic Environment[/caption]
That little headline got my attention a while back and now it and the attached image are following me.  No, I’m not being paranoid.
Every now and then I do a search for all things Lupus and lately an article on toxins in our environment has been popping up on a number of health sites.  [...]

Mervyn Dymally - Photo Credit: Robert Durell, Los Angeles Times [/caption]
Interesting story.  Apparently, two former staffers, Jason and Tamara Mitchell (husband and wife), filed a claim against Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton) claiming Dymally violated state law by telling them they could not take more time off work for medical reasons and retaliated when they complained [...]

Women go bald, too — The most common cause is female pattern baldness, which is a multifaceted problem, related to heredity and endocrinology (hormones). It is thought that it is a response to either an increase or decrease of circulating androgens (or male-type hormones such as testosterone, which women also have).  [Read More]

AstraZeneca buys rights to antibody - AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit has bought the rights from a Japanese biotechnology company to develop and sell an experimental treatment for lupus and other autoimmune diseases.  SBI Biotech’s antibody targets the ILT7 protein, which is expressed on immune system cells known as plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Such cells are thought to [...]

FDA Reports Deadly Brain Infection With Rituxan — The agency says a woman died of the rare viral infection more than a year and a half after discontinuing the drug, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and is marketed in the US by Genentech and Biogen Idec.  [Read More]

What is histoplasmosis? drug regulators say a class of medicines called TNF alpha blockers such as Enbrel, Remicade, Humira and Cimzia must carry stronger warnings that they pose a serious risk of histoplasmosis infection, a respiratory or blood illness caused by fungi endemic to the Midwest. Yesterday’s announcement by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [...]

Risk of stroke rising in women of all ages — Of every five deaths from the disease, the American Stroke Association says three occur in women. And while there are misconceptions that stroke only affects older women, the association reminds that the condition isn’t a “geriatric disease.” If you suffer from migraines, it might be [...]

Invisible Illness Week Offers Free Online Seminars Regarding College and Career - National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week is September 8-14, and Monday through Friday is a live virtual conference, featuring twenty seminars via Blog Talk Radio at www.invisibleillness.com. Special guests will give a 30-minute presentation and then take questions from callers.  [Read More]

Stem-cell transplant staves off radical surgery for Crohn’s sufferer — Less than a year ago, 25-year-old Billy Tytaneck felt as if he’d been backed into a corner.  The severe case of Crohn’s disease he’d been battling for half his life was becoming impossible to live with. Dr. Harold Atkins agreed to help Tytaneck last winter, [...]

Human Genome Sciences Completes Enrollment In Second Phase 3 Lymphostat-B(R) Trial - “If LymphoStat-B is successful in Phase 3, we believe that it could represent a breakthrough in the treatment of patients suffering from SLE,” said H. Thomas Watkins, President and Chief Executive Officer, HGS. “We have now completed enrollment in both of our LymphoStat-B [...]

Flint teen becomes center of debate over Gardasil cervical vaccine — Sammie and Matia White thought they were following the law when they got their 17-year-old daughter vaccinated with Gardasil.  Willams received her first shot in December, and by February she had broken out with a rash all over her body and her hands and [...]

Bone Marrow May Help Treat Bowel Disease — A new study in mouse model has shown that infusions of a particular bone marrow stem cell appears to control inflammatory bowel disease.  Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital found that mesenchymal stem cells, known to control several immune system activities, allowed the regeneration of the gastrointestinal [...]

It is often difficult to explain the on again off again symptoms of lupus and the flares.  There are days we look well and can push ourselves to the extreme.  Then there are the days we can barely rise from bed, put on clothes or muster the energy to make a pot of coffee.
It is [...]

I’ll be honest, I do not trust this drug and I especially have difficulty dealing with the fact that many of our legislators, without reading any of the FDA’s literature, will vote to mandate this drug be given to young adults and teenagers.
Yes, I said mandated.  Three U.S. states have passed laws mandating Gardasil, an [...]

How nice is that?  I really can’t tell you how warm and fuzzy that has made me feel.  I suspected pleurisy but when I last experienced it some ten plus years ago, I did not remember it being sooooo painful.  This also comes with an interesting story.
I had this older doctor who must have known [...]

I don’t know what I had but it was a nasty little bug.  I believe I picked up this bug three weeks ago when I decided to purchase fruits and veggies from a store other than Whole Foods.  Within 24-hours after eating what I believe was a bad cantaloupe — don’t know why — I [...]

B cells can act alone in autoimmune diseases - B cells, the source of damaging auto-antibodies, have long been thought to remain quiet in autoimmune diseases unless they are given a kick-start by T-cells. Researchers from Yale and Boston universities had found that toll-like receptors recognize and react to “”self”” molecules, in particular mammalian DNA [...]

I just heard the news on CNN and shortly thereafter the calls, text messages and emails flowed in.  While I have been dealing with my own hellish week, Bernard Jeffrey “Bernie Mac” McCullough was engaged in a fight for his life.
Growing up in Chicago, it was not uncommon to run across some of Chicago’s finest [...]

Thank God!  The kidney has finally stopped hurting but the muscle pain caused by all of the tenseness still lives.  That I can live with, the kidney pain was so miserable I really wanted to take myself out back and shoot me.
I got to see my doctor yesterday and he seemed to have a bad [...]

I found this image at SciencePunk.com and I loved the changed caption about tearing out your own kidney.  Today I seriously wanted to do just that.
Last week I talked about my lab test showing “mild inflammation”.  Today that mild inflammation turned into kidney on fire, blood pressure on the rise and Angela was not a [...]

Cutting The Brakes On The Immune System; Newly Discovered Gene Variant Implicated In Lupus - Your immune system may have more in common with a Corvette than you thought.  A new study by Patrick Gaffney, M.D., and Kathy Moser, Ph.D., of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation shows that variation of a particular gene—known as TNFAIP3—may [...]

I’m doing research on autoimmune diseases and found this article, Our Bodies, Ourselves: First-World Women Face Unique Environmental Threats. Admittedly, much of my research is showing more than family history must be considered when looking at individuals with autoimmune diseases. We must also look at the environment. Many, particularly women, are [...]

Who Knew? Turns Out the Spleen Is Connected to the Brain — It turns out that the spleen is a more useful organ than we thought. For a good part of the last 100 years, experts have assumed that the spleen was merely a piece of tissue above our abdomen, there to filter and store [...]

Pre-eclampsia May Be Autoimmune Disease — Biochemists at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston say they are the first to provide pre-clinical evidence that pregnancy-induced high blood pressure or pre-eclampsia may be an autoimmune disease. Their research could provide novel diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities for this intractable disease. Findings appear online in Nature [...]

Photo Right:  Ellie Smith with an orphaned bobcat that was rehabilitated and later released into the wild.
Doing what I normally do, I stumbled upon an article about a woman I now admire.  Though I don’t know her and unfortunately, will never meet her, I was humbled reading her story.
For 25 years, Ellie Smith ran [...]

Living with pain — Singer Chantal Chamberland finally feeling relief from nagging arthritis.  Chantal Chamberland extends her hands for closer inspection.  “Look, no inflammation,” the Canadian jazz songbird says smugly.  When you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis, you don’t use words like “forever,” Chamberland confides, because there is no cure for the painful joint disease; there is [...]