science – Yarn, Books & Roses

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: What a Cell Wants… (AKA the Sugar Rant)

I’ve been pressured repeatedly to “give up sugar” to control my inflammation. Really, people have been pretty darn aggressive in this messaging both in person and online. To be fair, the people pressing this message must have felt they were improved when they cut back on sugar, but every time it happens I am torn between tears and frustration.

I’m sorry, but this is like telling me that I can’t put gasoline into my car anymore. The car simply can’t run on air alone, and neither can I.

Eukaryotic Cell — Cutest drawing of a cell ever!! This little guy, an idealized animal cell, needs many essential components to stay alive, including a constant supply of glucose and oxygen. That’s what a cell wants, what a cell needs…

Okay, to be clear, we do need a component of air for energy: oxygen. I was running short of that commodity earlier in my scleroderma career and had to be placed on supplemental oxygen for about 6 months waiting for my drugs to kick in and save my ass. If you are short on oxygen, as I can attest, you are also short on energy and you can’t think very well. I was in trouble, as my pulmonologist put it, because my “engine” (my lungs) was too small for my body.

The other essential energy component is sugar, or specifically, glucose. Cells, and by extension, bodies, use an amazing system of biochemical pathways to convert biological materials to glucose, maintain a steady concentration of glucose in your blood, and then pack away the excess for storage in your muscles and liver. If blood glucose levels drop too low your body releases glucose from storage. If the stored glucose gets used up, your body begins to cannibalize other tissues. Why is glucose so important? Because it is used in the mitochondria located in body cells along with oxygen to produce the energy molecules (ATP for you geeks out there) that are used to run the whole biological show. If there is no ATP, the whole show stops. That’s why it is critical to keep people breathing and their blood pumping, but also why it is important to consume glucose.

My relationship with glucose is pretty darn complex. Too much sugar at a time isn’t a good thing: it can dehydrate and damage tissue, and high blood sugar can cause blood pressure spikes. Take home lesson for me: don’t binge on milkshakes, sugary pops, and French fries. Because I had hypertension and a family member with diabetes, I have spent years developing a diet that has a low glycemic index. I eat yellow potatoes instead of white ones, recipes with half the flour replaced with oatmeal, and little sugar. I also eat fresh fruit in my yogurt smoothies, and rice mixed with veggies. I am eating sugar every single day in my meals, and it really is essential for me to function properly; the trick is to try to consume it in a way that helps maintain good blood sugar levels. Frosting loaded cinnamon rolls… NO!! Banana and strawberry smoothie with yogurt… YES!!

So, every time someone insists that I have to “cut out sugar” I can feel my head getting ready to explode. I wonder if they understand that potatoes, bread and rice are also “sugar”. Have they given up fruits? If they are also cutting out gluten they may be actually spiking their blood sugar with rice-based alternatives. It is kind of crazy talk… It also is kind of “it’s your fault you are sick” talk. Not nice!!

Knitting — It makes me go sit in a corner somewhere to knit away the frustration…

The research is mixed on the link between sugar and inflammation. There are lots of articles on healthy eating sites that say it is bad, but I wanted to see actual controlled experiments looking at the link between sugar and inflammation. There are several ways to check for inflammation but most look for inflammatory markers in the blood and cell permeability. This controlled research study found that there was no link between excessive sugar intake and inflammation. It’s kind of a small study, though, so I went hunting for more. This study showed that sugars obtained from food were not inflammatory, but when people consumed free sugars (spooned sugar into coffee or cereal, or drank sugary fruit juice) they did increase inflammatory markers. Cool. That totally makes sense, and explains why other people are reporting that they feel better when they “cut out sugar”. My sugar canister goes months without being opened… I don’t add sugar to anything unless I’m baking. Still on the hunt for info, I found this meta-analysis of research studies that showed that high-fructose corn sugar wasn’t any worse than any other in terms of inflammatory marker increases.

Okay, I think that the rant is over. Sugar is your friend, but don’t get crazy people…

Back to the knitting!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The Dairy Rant

It happened again just last month; I was advised by another scleroderma patient in a most assertive and authoritative manner that I could not eat any dairy because it “was inflammatory”. She followed up with a lecture on how cow milk is not appropriate for humans, and that most people were lactose intolerant because it wasn’t good for us once we become adults. In her defense, there are numerous sources on the internet that argue that dairy is inflammatory (like this one, and this one), and many people accept this as common knowledge.

Sigh.

Cat face. — This was not a message that the Mother of Cats wanted to hear…

I get it. We are all in the grips of a chronic disease that refuses to behave itself, and we all want regain some control through our diets. I just have trouble accepting these blanket arguments without working the problem first. Hello, Science Girl! Here’s a little unpacking of the inflammatory dairy argument:

Inflammation: for me, the easiest way to think of this is the heat, redness, swelling and pain that is associated with trauma or irritation. It’s your body’s first level response to a possible invader; the local temperature is raised, fluid moves into tissue to allow defensive white blood cells to move around, and signals are sent out to activate other parts of the immune system. One of these signals is C-reactive protein, which can be measured in blood. Mine gets measured every month.
Cow milk: cow milk is inappropriate? What?! Does that mean I can’t eat chicken eggs, or even bananas for that matter? Moving on…
Lactose: this is a disaccharide, a two-unit sugar made from the simple sugars glucose and galactose. In our digestive system we need to use the enzyme lactase (made in the lining of your small intestine) to break the two units of lactose apart so that the single sugar units (glucose and galactose) can be absorbed. Lactose itself is too big to be absorbed.
Lactose intolerance: if your body no longer produces the enzyme lactase that lactose ends up in your large intestines where it is food for the bacteria that live there. Yep! Bacteria party time! The byproducts that they produce as they grow cause the unhappy inflammatory outcomes (gas, bloating, pain, diarrhea) that all lactose intolerant people know only too well.
Allergies: if you are allergic to casein, found in milks, then you need to avoid dairy as it will be an inflammatory agent for sure!

So, here is the take home lesson from my unpacking: if you are allergic to milk or have lactose intolerance, then consuming dairy products will make you sick… they are inflammatory. Cool. I get it. What if you are lactose intolerant though… can’t you just avoid the lactose and keep the dairy? Armed with my food log, more curiosity than is probably good for me, and a tendency to use myself as a one person experimental animal, I kept looking for safe food to eat.

I have to be frank here. My intestinal woes are so bad that I have developed a fraught relationship with the refrigerator. Seriously, I open the door, look inside, and view the contents with a jaded eye as I ask myself: what can I eat in here that won’t make me sick? I keep a food log, and anything that makes me sick more than once gets tossed. I throw out lots of food. I have also discovered that there are some foods that are the safest to fall back on when I’m struggling.

Dairy. No matter how bad things are, I can rely on yogurt and cheese, along with a few other mainstays, to get me through a rough patch and stable again.

Here’s the trick: I choose my dairy very carefully. My milk is the kind that has the lactose removed. I only eat yogurt that has live cultures in it; they already snacked on the lactose and it’s gone before I eat it!

Cheese label. — I only buy natural cheese, and as you can see it is made with almost no additives. The enzymes were used to create curds in the milk, and that cheese culture took care of the lactose for me.

I read a lot of labels these days as I shop, and slowly I have discovered products that are safe and reliable. There is a sour cream with cultures that is safe. There is a safe cottage cheese. I haven’t found safe ice cream, but I’m still on the hunt. It’s best to stick to natural products, but even that isn’t good enough.

For me, always on the hunt for food that I can eat, dairy is my fall back safe zone. It will get me through a bad time, and if I eat yogurt every day I actually seem to improve. My C-reactive protein level drops. It’s almost like dairy is anti-inflammatory…

There are now numerous studies that show that dairy is anti-inflammatory. This review of clinical evidence showed that dairy reduced inflammation in individuals without a milk allergy, and here is another presentation arguing that dairy is anti-inflammatory. Check out the references!

So I told this woman that I had discovered that I needed to eat yogurt every day or I would run into trouble. Her response? You can’t eat that type of yogurt… it has sugar!! Sugar is inflammatory!

Sigh.

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Get Ready for the Rants!

Yep. This has all been about me needing to vent about all the alternative medicine and false information out there that is directed at people who are seeking to manage chronic conditions, lower their cancer risk, improve their lives, boost their immune systems, or just be more healthy.

There is so much coming at me that I would be a total victim if I didn’t have a way to sort through things. It is all presented as “scientific”, backed by “studies”, and supported by numerous testimonials. Often I am pressured by other people to adopt their products, treatment plans, or dietary guidelines, sometimes to an unacceptable degree. The message “it’s your fault that you’re sick because you won’t do what I say” is out there, and I am surely not the only person to have been targeted by this.

Here’s the advice that comes my way:

Stop taking your drugs. The doctors don’t know what they are doing, and the side effects are unacceptable. (Really… this happens a lot!)
You can get well if you:
- Follow the AP Protocol by going to an alternative medicine doctor
- Never eat any processed or artificial foods
- Only use natural products and eat organic
- Only eat alkaline foods
You cannot consume any:
- Salt
- Sugar
- Alcohol
- Gluten
- Dairy
- Processed foods
- Transfats
- Seeds
You have to supplement your diet every day with :
- Probiotics
- Prebiotics
- Turmeric
- Cinnamon
- Fish Oil
- Vitamin D
- Alkaline water
- Tart cherry
- Natural cider vinegar
You can treat your symptoms with:
- Essential oils
- Reflexology
- Exercise
- High fiber foods
- Heat
- Cold
- Amber beads
- Magnetic bracelets
- Herbal tea
- Aloe vera
Your disease was caused by:
- A chemical exposure
- Vaccines
- That viral illness that you had sometime in the past
- Leaky gut

Truly, if I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by the fatigue, brain fog and all the other things that I deal with, having this all come my way is way over the top. Ugh. It is a lot of information, some reliable, some not so reliable, and some just plain false, for me to sort through.

Get ready!! The mini-rants are just ahead as I unpack as much of this as I can for you in the days ahead.

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The Only Point in Common

Two years ago I was getting bounced around between several doctors as they tried to figure out why I was struggling to breath. The rheumatologist felt I should see a cardiologist. The pulmonologist felt that I needed to be treated by the rheumatologist. The internist insisted that the pulmonologist needed to intervene. The rheumatologist was very reluctant to give me an inhaler even though he had ordered the PFT that indicated that I needed one.

I was getting close to pulling out my hair! Literally, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and no one could manage to get the meal assembled. I was the cake in the oven, and I had just collapsed into an ugly, doughy mess…

“Look”, said the rheumatologist in the middle of this, “you are the only point in common between all of your doctors. Each one of us sees just one slice of your health, but you are the one getting all the info…” In effect, she was telling me to take charge of my health. Uh…

Spock: He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking… (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn)

Seriously? I’m expected to organize this circus? I have skills, but to suggest that I should run this show is ludicrous…

Except, from a certain viewpoint, I am running the show; I AM the show. I have a serious illness, and I have a team of doctors to address my symptoms and halt my disease’s progression. I need to be proactive and ensure that I get the treatment that I need. Clearly, I needed help to sort through the conflicting advice and to assign priorities to the elements of my treatment plan.

There needed to be one doctor who knew me well, understood the big picture, who could also cut through the red tape and facilitate immediate medical response from the most appropriate provider if needed.

I made an appointment with my internist, who was also my primary care physician, and laid out the problem. I told her that I needed someone to review all the notes and test results from the other doctors on a regular basis to understand the big picture. I shared with her my concerns about differing information from the other physicians: I needed an expert to work with me to coordinate my treatment plan. There needed to be a doctor who saw me on a regular basis, who knew me and my situation, who could take a “snapshot” of my health situation, and who could see me almost immediately if I got into trouble. One of the problems that I struggle with is knowing which doctor to call when I develop problems; with this arrangement I have a designated first contact who will decide which specialist needs to be contacted next.

We agreed that I should come in every three months for the medical review and snapshot of my current status.

Everything changed for me. My internist reads everything from the other doctors at these appointments, and she answers questions that I have in a cross-disciplinary way that the other specialists can’t. It’s more like a consultation than the usual medical appointment. She looks to see what has been missed by the other doctors, and facilitates communication between the doctors. She has sent me for immediate testing, cut through the red tape so I could get oxygen when I needed it, and makes sure I get the complete text of all testing reports.

I make an appointment with her before I see the specialists to plan for those appointments, and then I see her afterwards to debrief on what happened and to see if anything was missed. When I go to my appointments with the specialists I can talk about test results, my prescriptions, and the symptoms that are concerning me; I have become an informed patient. Because of this I am a better conduit of information between the doctors, and the coordination of care and smooth communication has greatly increased. My doctors and I are now collaborative partners working to manage my disease.

From a collection of 6 doctors I now have a smoothly coordinated team to jointly treat my illness. For me, this is a huge difference! I’m now in much better shape, and I feel more in control of what is happening. I AM the only point in common, so I had to activate my hidden superpower of facilitation and coordination to make it work.

And knit. I had to knit a lot.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Hard Choices (Part 2)

Last week I wrote a post about trying to make a good decision about what drug I should be treated with for my systemic sclerosis. My rheumatologist had offered me methotrexate and CellCept; after trying to gather info about the drugs and their symptoms I unhappily picked methotrexate.

The first weeks of the drug seemed okay. I had a couple of hard days after taking my dose on Monday, but then I would feel much better for the rest of the week as the pain and brain fog receded for several days. The crazy thing was, my knees hurt REALLY badly during those two bad days. I checked online and other people had experience a similar phenomenon, so I soldiered on. Then one week the pain was pretty bad in my lower chest and right side and I was having trouble walking and breathing…

IV in arm. — Off to the ER I went where they hunted for lung damage and blood clots…

It was an inflammation of the cartilage of my ribs, a condition called costochondritis. I called the rheumatologist’s office to see what I should do next, but didn’t hear back for a couple of days. I then emailed, and called again.

Finally the call came back; I was having a rare bone reaction and needed to stop the methotrexate. He was starting me on CellCept immediately.

Oh, that was an adventure. So much stomach pain… scratch that… stomach fire! Not just my stomach… my intestines were on fire too!! I gulped down spoonfuls of coconut oil trying to baby my stomach lining. I added food with the pills. I started vomiting in the middle of the night. It didn’t matter what I did, my stomach was going to be very upset. I stopped the drug and shot off an email to the rheumatologist again.

Hence began the two month battle to get me onto another form of drug in CellCept, which is mycophenolate mofetil. A stomach gentle version called Myfortic did exist, but it was not approved for systemic sclerosis, so the pharmacy refused to fill it. My rheumatologist filed an appeal. It was denied. My rheumatologist doubled down. Another rejection. Eventually I drove down to the Kaiser pharmacy and talked to the pharmacist as calmly as I could. I reminded him that Myfortic as just another salt of the approved drug, I had failed the approved form, my rheumatologist had appealed for this drug, and that I had a letter on file from another doctor in the Kaiser system stating that my gastritis prevented me from taking NSAIDS or anything else that would damage my stomach lining. I must have looked pathetic, because he gave me the pills.

Three years later I have greatly improved because of this drug that we had to fight for. In the meantime I have discovered (by hunting for info on PubMed Health) that while methotrexate helps with symptoms like inflammation and fatigue, the better choice in the long run is the drug that I am now receiving as it is associated with skin, lung, and heart improvements and better survival rates. I do have a higher lymphoma risk with this drug, and infections are a constant concern, but I think that I’m with the best drug available for me right now.

There is a take home lesson here. If you aren’t happy with your treatment, speak up! I should have contacted that doctor about those hurting knees long before I ended up in the ER. It’s easy to take a passive course when you are dealing with busy doctors and unhelpful pharmacists, especially when you aren’t sure if your symptoms are significant, but it is worth the time to shoot off a fast email anyway.

And let’s be honest. There are no easy choices, only hard ones. But even a bad choice can be corrected down the road with some luck, persistence, and a dash of science.

Rose — I bet you wondered where the rose was, didn’t you. Here it is, a little beat up by the hot weather, but still looking great!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Research Results

Yesterday was a good day for me. I ran to the library, went grocery shopping, and had my hair cut. The stylist who cut my hair, however, was having a poor day: she has fibromyalgia and was struggling with the pressure front moving through Colorado. I told her about bananas, and she told me about a new product that she was buying off the internet. As we swapped info she pulled out the bottle of her supplement and I snapped a picture of it with my camera. She gushed about her product: it is just great! It cleans toxins from your liver and pancreas too!

Okay, I just checked out this product online, and it will need a blog post of its own. It has 19 different ingredients in it that I have to check out, but right now I think that I will need to stay away from it as it has aspirin in it from a willow bark ingredient. I already know that aspirin is something that can hurt my (already struggling) kidneys and put my stomach lining at risk (the gastroenterologist sent me a strongly worded letter on this topic… I’m complying!) The other ingredients might be okay, however, and I should check them out to see if they are possibilities for me to add to my diet.

So, how do I do this? I do lots of searches with key words like “research”, “evidence”, “inflammation”, “mortality rates”, “efficacy” and the item that I’m searching for. When a friend recommended that I try tart cherry extract to help with inflammation I typed in “does tart cherry reduce inflammation” and discovered that there was an active ingredient in tart cherry that really did reduce inflammation and that it was more gentle on stomach linings than a NSAID. Clinical research projects had been done that showed positive effects by measuring inflammation markers in patient blood. I talked to both my internist and my rheumatologist about it, got their okay with some stipulations, started the supplement with medical monitoring (blood drawn every month), and had to stop 3 months later when my kidney function dropped dramatically. Oops.

There is an important lesson here. Just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean that it is safe. Think like a scientist. Keep a journal of your disease symptoms, diet and interventions. Ask questions and talk to your doctors. Educate yourself as much as you can.

English Rose. — Time for a rose break! Look at what I found in the garden this morning!

Where do I go for information? I could have gotten info from sites linked to the company that markets tart cherry extracts, but that information is somewhat tainted by the simple fact that they want me to buy their product. I look for information from major publications and research funded by the public domain. Some of the best places that I’ve found to go are:

The National Center for Biotechnical Information (NCBI) has links to lots of places you can access for information. I used this site a lot as a teacher as students could look at genes and run DNA comparisons. Now I can use it to research tart cherry!
Linked to the NCBI home page is a great resource: PubMed. Everything in the medical and biological universe is searchable at this site; you can see the synopsis with a general outline of the research and results, and there are links to the journals and books along with information on how to access the full text. Some full text articles are free, and there is advice on how to get others.
A subset of PubMed that is extremely useful, both for the search engine and information on how to evaluate information you find, is PubMed Health. For me, this is the mother lode.
I live in Aurora, Colorado. I am lucky in that the CU School of Medicine is located here, and there is a great library there. I went into the library, talked to them, and got an account that allows me to access articles through their licenses. So far I’ve only had to resort to this option a couple of times, but it is good to have it.

Next to keeping my journal, the info I find using these resources has been extremely helpful and empowering in my battle with these ill-behaved autoimmune conditions.

Knowledge is power!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Controlled Experiments

I literally learned about controlled experiments at my mother’s knee; there was a new baby in the house, and she was slowly introducing solid foods into his diet and I was helping to feed him. She carefully added only one new food a week: applesauce, carrots, squash… it was boring and I wanted to give him lots of interesting foods all at once. Nope. She insisted that it was important to keep everything exactly the same EXCEPT for the new food that was being introduced; if the baby got sick then we would know that the new food was the cause. Bam! This is an explanation of controlled experiments that even my five year old self could understand.

Upset cat — The Mother of Cats was raised by a very smart woman…

As a person with a chronic illness I hang out in internet forums and support groups that are awash with lots of confusing and conflicting information. It is a lot to sort through, and I find myself searching for validating information generated by that method I first learned from my mom: results from controlled scientific studies.

This is what I’m looking for when I deep dive into the internet looking for results on medications, alternative medicine treatments, supplements, exercise, possible causes of my illness, whatever.

Who did this research? Is it being presented by someone with a financial stake in the results? For example, research showing that cigarettes had no impact on cancer rates funded by the tobacco industry was later shown to not be valid. There was research bias in the tobacco-funded research. I look for bias like that as I collect information.
Did this research study have a control group? This means that if a group of patients received a drug, was there another matched group that did not get the drug; the two groups should be compared to see if the drug impacted their illness.
How well matched were the two groups? Ideally, they should be as identical as possible. The groups should have patients of the same ages, genders, diagnoses, etc.
What was the data that was being collected? I feel that hard data like lung volume, CAT scans, arterial pressure or blood tests are more meaningful than a survey filled out by patients that reports how “bad” they feel.
How large were the research groups? A study done with only a dozen patients is not necessarily invalid, but one done with a couple of hundred patients is one whose results I’m more likely to regard as meaningful.
The gold standard in research studies is one that assigns one group the drug, and the other group a placebo (an inactive dose) as the control. The patients and the doctors do no know which patients are receiving the drug, and which are getting placebo. This type of study, a double blind, is considered the most reliable as bias has been removed: differences between the two groups is due only to the drug.

This is a lot to keep in mind when looking at research reports, but after a while it gets easier. I used to hunt for newspaper reports of medical research to use with my classes. One of the favorites was this study about a virus that causes obesity…

Mice used in medical research studies are genetically identical. In the fat virus study animals were kept in identical conditions and one group was infected with the virus, and the other was not. The fat boy got the virus. (okay, this picture was swiped off the internet… I have no idea what actually happened to these two particular mice, but you get the idea…)

I don’t have the article from the Denver Post anymore, but here is the same study described on WebMD. The research, done by Richard Atkinson, M.D., showed that animals infected with the Ad36 virus have a huge weight gain even though they were eating the same amount as the control group. It happened in any animal group exposed to the Ad36 virus: mice, rats, chickens, monkeys. When he checked the blood of humans for antibodies to Ad36, he discovered that 30% of humans had antibodies to the virus, and those people were significantly heavier than people without the antibodies. Here’s the breakdown of the experiment:

Virus exposed mice: experimental group
Mice not exposed to the virus: control group
Conditions kept constant: the students could like several like age, type of mouse, genders, food, cage size, etc.
Data collected: weight gain

My students could also come up with the hypothesis and make predictions for further experiments. It was always interesting to me that many students would insist that obesity was just the result of poor diet and lack of exercise and that this data couldn’t be true. That’s bias, I would tell them. You have to follow the data; these results don’t mean that diet and exercise aren’t important, but you can’t just dismiss them out of hand, especially since it was validated using several animal models…

This is the type of thinking that I try to cling to as I hunt for information that might help me handle my chronic condition. Will essential oils help? Which ones? What is this whole AP protocol? Is sugar inflammatory? What about dairy? Is CellCept better than methotrexate in the long run? What is the best treatment for PAH? Should I go to yoga class? What studies have been done, and what does the data say? Learn, learn, learn.

My best survival skill is now the one that I learned at my mother’s knee.