Losing good friends and reflecting on life

The worst thing about knowing others with brain cancer is that I keep losing good friends to it with alarming regularity. 

My friend Tom Attwater passed away recently after suffering with the disease while selflessly helping his daughter by raising money for treatment for her neuroblastoma brain tumour. 

His story is a remarkable one and it is well worth taking the time to read more about this extraordinarily kind, reflective family man before he succumbed to this cruel disease. I admired him very much and my thoughts are with his family at this incredibly difficult time. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An explorative essay: Can magnesium chloride raise seizure threshold?

Image
Exploiting ionic changes in the epileptic brain to increase seizure threshold with oral supplementation of magnesium chloride Epilepsy is a serious neurological disorder marked by sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions, associated with abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Seizures are associated with neuronal ionic changes (Schwartzkroin, 1998) that can be managed with increased efficacy through magnesium chloride supplementation. Magnesium supplementation should be part of an essential component of a management strategy for any type of epilepsy to raise seizure threshold and maintain trace element homeostasis. The form of magnesium that has been used most clinically and has the longest therapeutic use to treat epilepsy in the literature is magnesium sulphate, however this is not practical or convenient for patients with epilepsy. While there needs to be more research into other forms of magnesium to manage epilepsy, there remains ...
Read more

5 crucial facts to be aware of if you're on AEDs

1. ' Anticonvulsants can interfere with calcium and vitamin D metabolism. They cause an increased rate of bone turnover, thus affecting bone density. It is recommended that anybody who is taking anticonvulsant medication should also be taking additional vitamin D.' 'Many doctors, however, are not aware of the association between anticonvulsant medication and bone disease and less than 10 percent of neurologist recommend taking calcium and vitamin D to protect against side effects of these drugs.' From countless studies including: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920121114001661 And http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059131107002385 2. Switching from branded meds to unbranded does make a difference and can result in breakthrough seizures. The government has recently made branded medications less available to cut costs. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21521860/ 3. Simply asking your GP for a FREE vitamin D test can definitely help yo...
Read more

Orexin/hypocretic receptor signalling and cancer.

Image
Let's consider Orexin/hypocretin receptor signalling and how we may exploit this system for brain cancer management. As we can see in the diagrams below, orexin neutrons regulate various activities such as wakefulness, feeding, reward and thermogenesis. A ketogenic diet, normalisation of sleep/wake cycles, fasting, stimulation of thermogenic pathways and giving the brain fuels it thrives on could act as key strategies we can adopt to take advantage of the fact that orexin appears to have potential as a novel, highly-specific treatment for various localised and metastatic cancers. This is not quite as simple as it may sound as you can always have too much of a 'good' stressor or thing before it becomes 'bad'- eustress vs distress. We know of course that fat is a very efficient source of energy for the brain and ketone bodies are neuroprotective, the body energy level influences orexin neuronal activity to coordinate arousal and energy homeostasis. Management of chron...
Read more