Currently viewing the category: "immunosuppressive"

Drugs Causing Disease

By On · Add Comment · In autoimmunity, chemotherapy, Crohn's disease, dermatologists, immune system, immunosuppressive, inflammatory bowel disease, skin cancer, sun exposure, thiopurines, ulcerative colitis, UV radiation

You may not know this but…sometimes drugs used to fight one condition cause other equally health damaging conditions. Take chemotherapy, for instance: it’s immunosuppressive. In other words, it kills all cells–cancer and healthy immune cells together. Not a great thing when the immune system works 24/7 to keep us free from infection and cancers. But that’s the idea–kill all the cells, and let the body rebuild itself with healthy cells, yet sans the cancerous ones.

How about other disorders, like the inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Immunosuppressive drugs are often given to people suffering from ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease too. These conditions are inflammatory in nature–that is, the body goes through major inflammation of the digestive tract, usually the small intestine or colon, leading to abdominal pain, diarrhea, and bloody stool among other symptoms. To combat them, immunosuppressants are often used to shut down the body’s immune system to prevent it from attacking itself (autoimmunity). Unfortunately, some patients are developing skin cancer as a result.

In a recent French study it was found that both past and present use of a widely used class of immunosuppressants called thiopurines significantly increased the risk of non-melanoma skin cancer in inflammatory bowel disease patients. The increased risk was seen in all patients, even those under 50; however, it increased with age. As a result, researchers recommend that anybody taking thiopurines now or at any time in the past protect their skin from UV radiation and receive regular dermatologic screening, regardless of their age.

Non-melanoma skin cancer includes basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, which are the most common cancers diagnosed in North America.

I find these results and conclusions rather harrowing for two reasons. First, I strongly believe that these conditions are related to lifestyle factors like diet and toxin ingestion (smoking, for example). Although not necessarily straight forward in which foods are the causative factors, I believe most everybody has foods that they are sensitive to. Unfortunately, they may be foods that aren’t generally recognized as allergens–like the common wheat or dairy–but nevertheless cause the body to respond defensively to them. Repeated ingestion will ultimately lead to inflammation, which can become chronic and thus classified as IBD.

Second, why the treatment option becomes an immunosuppressive drug, in my opinion, is that doctors are simply at a loss at what else to do, so they go for broke–they simply attack the symptoms, or the body’s response–quite foolish I believe. It is not surprising to me that the risk of developing skin cancer goes up. Duh! Suppressed immune system leads to increased infections and increased cancers.

Finally, I think it’s ludicrous that the answer is to “protect oneself” from the life giving rays of the sun. This is just another case of being at a loss. We can’t figure out why our blessed drugs and medical ideology aren’t figuring out this skin cancer thing, so it must be the sun. Uh yeah, the source of all life in the solar system; the entity which provides energy for all living things, and we shouldn’t expose ourselves to it. C’mon.

Further, this anti-sun sentiment has been pushed by dermatologists and the entire medical profession to the degree that people are coating their skin with chemicals so as to prevent themselves from getting the healing and life sustaining rays of the sun. Puh-leeze! No doubt, baking in the sun like a freakin’ piece of bacon is unwise…but so is getting no sun.
Please medical profession wake up! Drugs cause skin cancer, and the inordinate amount of people walking the planet on multiple drugs they take daily is just as likely the cause of increased skin cancer as sun exposure is, probably more so. Thank goodness time acts as the greatest of observation tools.

Vitamin D Supplementation VERY Effective

By On · Add Comment · In cardiomyopathy, diabetes, heart disease, immunosuppressive, increased risk of death, skin cancer, sun exposure, sunscreen, vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D insufficiency, vitamin D supplements

More evidence showing the dangers of vitamin D insufficiency, as a large new study shows that people with low blood concentrations of this vital nutrient are at an increased risk for dying of any cause. Any cause? Yes, and even more startling was that  by simply boosting low levels with vitamin D supplementation it cut peoples’ risk of dying in half.

According to the latest study, which looked at 10,899 patients at the University of Kansas Hospital, 70% were deficient in vitamin D, and they were also at significantly higher risk for a variety of heart diseases, including  hypertension, coronary artery disease, cardiomyopathy and diabetes. D-deficiency also nearly doubled a person’s likelihood of dying, whereas correcting the deficiency with supplements lowered the risk of death by 60%.

rickets_boy

Rickets

These numbers highlight previous research that has shown many North Americans to have insufficient blood levels of vitamin D. While Rickets due to vitamin D deficiency has been well understood for years,  the degree to which blood levels of vitamin D play a role in overall health and well-being is just starting to become clear: We now know that levels falling below 30 ng/ml are incompatible with good health.

According to the latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an estimated 25-57% of adults are vitamin D insufficient, while other studies have suggested the number is as high as 70%.  Cardiologists from the University of Kansas study have found that people deficient in D were more than two times as likely to have diabetes, 40% more likely to have high blood pressure and about 30% more likely to suffer from cardiomyopathy (diseased heart muscle) than people without D deficiency.”We expected to see that there was a relationship between heart disease and vitamin D deficiency; we were surprised at how strong it was,” said Dr. James L. Vacek, a professor of cardiology at the University of Kansas Hospital and Medical Center. “It was so much more profound than we expected.”
Vacek believes that so many people are deficient because they aren’t getting enough sun. Humans should get 90% of their vitamin D from the sun, while only getting 10% from food. We need sunlight to make vitamin D in our bodies, so 20 minutes per day is the minimum necessary exposure to maintain proper blood levels. With the fear of skin cancer looming large, many have taken to using sunscreens to reduce total sun exposure.

130571880-18130246

Experts say that in the Northern United States and Canada the sun isn’t strong enough during winter months to make sufficient vitamin D, even if the weather was warm enough to induce people to expose their skin for an extended period. To combat this seasonal deficiency, adults should get vitamin D levels checked by their doctors, and take vitamin D supplements.
This study definitely comes at an opportune time, as many in the medical field have dismissed previous vitamin D research as inconclusive, particularly the role supplements can play in returning the health to normal (or optimal) for those suffering from deficiency. I have wondered  for some time why so many doctors and med-policy stiffs have been so adamant at denying the research results on vitamin D. The only thing I can think of is that they just despise being wrong. I don’t believe it’s a pharmaceutical industry conspiracy necessarily, as many have been wont to do, but purely a clinging to old, outdated beliefs; really that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me, in light of some pretty solid data. I can certainly understand the uncertainty, but many of the previous studies have been well done, and they are vast in number, so really…what’s the problem?
I just think the old guard will never accept that they were wrong about supplementation from the start, no matter how well-intentioned their skepticism might have been; and I think many are wrong today for advocating minimal sun exposure for the masses. Some increases in skin cancer can be from chronic pharmaceutical use, too, you know…particularly medications that are immunosuppressive. It was easy to blame skin cancer on the sun in the past, but that was wrong. The sun is the most life-giving source in the solar system—avoiding it is just unwise. This latest vitamin D study is simply more evidence to support a universal truth.
Copyright © 2013 Dr. Nick Campos - All Rights Reserved.