Early detection

Hi all,

I know I haven't put up anything since just after Christmas, but I'm hoping that this will get me out of that rut. Since January, most of what I've been doing has been school related - I had mocks, then shortly after mock exams revision started, so school has (and will continue to, for another couple of months) taken over my life.

However, what I just saw was so amazing I felt compelled to write about it.

It's all to do with this article here. Basically, its a new method of early detection. The body is scanned with similar techniques to MRI, but with several resonant frequencies at the same time. This elicits a "song". This song tells researchers whether the tissue is healthy or diseased. However, and this is the bit that cannot be done by traditional MRI scans, it can also tell you the severity of the disease, as well as which disease it is. With a regular MRI, you would simply get a bright area on the scan which would have to be interpreted by a radiologist. With this technique, the analysis would be done by machine, using an algorithm similar to the one used for facial recognition.

As far as techniques go this one has amazing practicalities because it has the potential to be over in minutes and could well become part of an annual checkup, catching serious diseases like cancers, multiple sclerosis, heart disease etc earlier than would have before, and preventative measures can be taken.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4122518/magnetic-resonance-fingerprinting-explanation-disease-detection-research http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mri http://cwru-daily.com/news/new-mri-method-fingerprints-tissues-and-diseases-leading-to-earlier-quicker-diagnoses/

Catch up

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 4^th 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 6^th 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.

http://xkcd.com/938/

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.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20585885

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/morning-sickness-nausea.aspx#close

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-against-leukemia-using-altered-t-cells.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/leukaemia-acute-lymphoblastic/Pages/Introduction.aspx

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hiv/pages/introduction.aspx

http://www.yale.edu/yaw/world.html