General catch up – I’ve just finished (hopefully the last)
of my Mandarin speaking and writing controlled assessments, so now I can totally
focus on my January exams.
One thing that has been in the news a lot recently is Kate
and William’s pregnancy. On the 4th of December she was admitted to
hospital with acute morning sickness. Acute morning sickness is also known as
hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) and it is a severe disease. It’s is characterised by prolonged and severe
nausea and vomiting, weight loss, a raised level of ketones in the blood and dizziness
and fatigue. It’s uncommon, but does affect 1 in 200. It can have complications
as people suffering from it struggle to keep food or drink down, and as a
result severe weight loss can result in a low birth rate, but the main danger
is dehydration. Kate was discharged on the 6th of December.
Something I found fascinating recently was this case here. This
is the story of Emma who had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is an aggressive cancer of the
white blood cells. This requires immediate attention and intense medical care. This
is caused by the uncontrolled production of blast cells, which are immature white
blood cells. This flooding of your body system results in imbalances – the individual
affected experiences tiredness (caused by a lack of oxygen carrying red blood
cells), unusual and frequent bleeding (caused by a lack of platelets which stop
bleeding), and a lowered immune defence (caused by a lack of mature white blood
cells to fight infection).
Around 8% of all people diagnosed with leukaemia are
diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, with the majority being diagnosed
between two and five years old.
Emma was cured by fairly unorthodox and experimental
methods. What happened was that she was injected with killer T-cells (yes, that
is their real name), modified to attack only Emma’s B-cells (the cancerous
ones). They had been modified to only target these cells using…. Wait for it….
HIV.
Yeah, that one made me sit down as well. HIV aka Human
Immuno-deficiency Virus is a disease caught by the exchange of bodily fluids. The
virus attacks the immune system and weakens your ability to fight infections
and disease. 3.1 million people die every year from AIDS (the advanced and
fatal form of HIV), so you can see how this might shock someone.
I can’t pretend to understand the mechanisms used here but
as far as I can tell it goes like this:
HIV/AIDS can fool the
immune system into not attacking it.
The T cells need to have the genetic information for “seek
and destroy B-cells” built into them
HIV is a method of invading the T-cells and implanting this
genetic information
The strain of HIV is an inactive one so the patient does not
have to choose between AIDS and leukaemia – they don’t end up with HIV. In
fact, although it is early days, they seem to end up either improved, or, with
their cancers in remission.
If anyone can clarify this for me, please, comment below.
This kind of fascinating and ground breaking research is
exactly why I want to get into medicine. It’s an amazing career and it is so,
so stupendously interesting and mind blowing. I cannot begin to imagine what an
impact this has had on the little girl’s life, and the application for this
kind of research is just too cool for words.
