Sleep and cancer

Man cannot survive lack of sleep for as long as he can survive deprivation of food. All the organs of the human body are subject to fatigue as such as our muscles, central nervous system and our sensory organs. Working these organs for sometime at a certain level of intensity and energy expenditure produces fatigue and requires an alternation of exertion and rest.

You must suspend activity temporarily in order to replenish energy. The fatigue that you feel shows how strenuous you have been exerting and going beyond your limits and maybe at a level where you sure could not further exert yourself. I hope you grasp the idea of not stretching what you cannot stretch by the law of nature. Fatigue is a behavioral regulator of activity which is physiological but may lead to pathological conditions of exhaustion or even of collapse that could be organic, psychological or psychosomatic.

Have you ever wondered why sometimes you feel emotionally and physically tired for no reason at all? Lack of sleep has serious consequences. The way you feel and think is being affected by lack of sleep. It has adverse effects on our motor skills and immunity. You should know by now that several nights of poor sleep can hamper immunity. Yeah…. Yeah… and still you are taking it for granted eh?

Learn to stay young and healthy by parking your bodies at the right time. I have encountered a lot of business and career professionals who are trying to find more profitable and productive time at work and a more balanced and enjoyable time at home depriving their selves with what I see is most important to keep them going – sleep!

Sleep could be America's number 1 health problem because of its stress related disorders reducing workplace productivity and affecting social relationships because of mood change. Please don’t cut back on sleep to get to the top. Money, personally for me as I see it, is not everything but health and relationships are!

The importance of sleep

Our biological clock runs on a daily basis called as the circadian rhythm. Normally your body is alert in the morning and winds down until nighttime when it is a natural state to sleep.

Before you wake up each day your body and blood temperature rises, your heart beats faster and your endocrine glands squirt out cortisol and other hormones you need to get going for the day.

At night before you go to sleep, your temperature, heart rate and blood pressure falls. Your body releases more melatonin from the bare of brain in response to declining levels of light. Thus cortisol is active at day and melatonin is active at night.

Wrong Impression

You may think you are active at night but your bodies may not agree. The point is we don’t go against nature and what we have been built from the very beginning of time. To make my point, I would like to share with you some research I have read in the past like some women working at night shifts found to be more vulnerable to breast and colon cancer and a news item regarding research on highly industrialized areas showing more workers working at night shifts getting cancer. Hah! Here’s more – fatigue and loss of appetite are also caused by the skewed circadian rhythm.

Part of each cell in your body is out of sync with healthy cells. One research found out that if you go to bed by 10pm and wake up at about 6am you reduced your risk on breast cancer by 50% lower.

Don’t take sleep for granted or shall we say life?

Sleep is so important that even one hour less of it each night can cut your life short. Research shows that people who sleep less than six hours a night don’t live as long as those who sleep for seven or eight hours. That magnificent multitasking intelligence that manages your mind and body needed to rest to properly perform all the tasks needed to carry out to keep you balanced and healthy. Sleep that is fewer than four hours invites onset of diseases as such as diabetes, high blood pressure and weight gain. Wow! What a waste of energy carrying out pain!

A simple lifestyle change can help you gain several more productive, creative and focused hours a day! Please don’t let habits and behaviors get in the way. Take sleep seriously and do what it takes to do to add more to your lives or at least keep those net income really an income and not a bounce back expense to medicals. As I have told you, money is not everything but health is!

Leeches, plasma and snake venom for beauty treatments, anyone?

Leech sucks! These are the ones most people heard about – leeches suck blood of people and animals. There are at least 650 species of leeches living all over the world usually thriving in places that are wet or damp. Leeches have a smaller sucker on its front end where its mouth is located and another larger sucker on its back end which helps hold on to surfaces like soil, rocks or animals.

Leeches are popular in prehistoric times to help treat some form of pain. The world’s first anticoagulant hirudin was discovered in the salivary gland of the medicinal leech Hirudo Medicinalis. This made scientist think that the leech is a living pharmacopeia that holds considerable promise in medical biotechnology.

Plastic and microvascular surgeons have been utilizing the ability of this medicinal worm to inject anticoagulants and remove blood. The use of leeches has been reported as an adjunct for grafted skin flaps and breast reconstruction. Removal of accumulated blood seems to be a task where the leech is well settled including their utility in the reattachment of severed digits. The leech is applied to the sutured lines of reimplanted digits in an attempt to reduce venous congestion following surgery where venous returns may be impaired.

The anticoagulants in its saliva cause the bites to bleed for many hours after the leech was detached. Systemic utilization of the leech salivary gland has been reported to prevent some pathological changes of diffuse intravascular coagulation (DIC). Leeches have been recently used in the evacuation of periorbital hematomas, used in treatment of hemorrhoids and varicose veins, prevents consumption of clotting factors and development of multiple microthombi and inhibition of localized hemorrhagic necrosis.

What really entice me to write about leeches is the phrase I’ve stumbled in on one of my research which is about its association to interfere on the metastatic growth of some lung tumors and its efficacy of a fibrinase on atherosclerotic plagues which is still under investigation. However the popularity curve of the leech has been as undulating as the manner in which it swims because its use has its own shortcomings also. Apparently clinicians do not recommend cross application of leeches because of the potential hazard for infection and its ability to harbor certain viruses for extended periods.

Leeches has become one of modern medicine's effective tools to restore blood flow as such as re-attached ears, fingers and toes. When placed on a finger or toe, the germ free leech attaches and begins sucking. The patient feels nothing but oxygen rich blood instantly begins to flow bringing the body part back to life again. Leeches, no matter how weird and yuk it may be, has its own vital medical use.

Cancer vaccine

Scientist may be a step closer to producing a specific targeted vaccine which could kill cancer cells. They were talking about designing a vaccine that has the ability to home in on proteins and has the capacity to deliver a message to the immune system. This will trigger the immune system to start attacking the invading cancer cells. UK researchers have identified a protein on the immune cells that may harness the body’s defenses to attack a tumor. The protein is unique to only one type of immune cell in the body which is called dendritic cell. Dendritic cell is responsible for triggering the body’s defense system.

The idea is to introduce a foreign molecule from a cancer cell to target dendritic cells. This will then cause the immune system to attack the invading cancer. The same concept could be applied to treatment for diseases HIV or malaria. The vaccines work by triggering an army of immune cells to attack potentially dangerous foreign molecules wherein dendritic cells tend to act as messengers that tells T cells which ones to attack. The research is still ongoing but is very promising indeed.

Robots killing cancer

Now this is the biggest hit of the century – robots killing cancer!

Scientists have created tiny mechanical nanoworms that could zip through the human body like cruise missiles. It has the ability to find and detect cancerous tumors before it even begins to spread. The friendly robots are said to be 3 million times smaller than an earthworm and are designed to release a drug that may kill the tumor without harming adjacent tissues. After delivery of the drugs to disease organs they self destruct and exit the body.

The problem is our own body’s defense mechanism. How can they stay long enough to find the tumors and complete their repair task without being attacked by the body’s defense mechanism itself?

Was pentagon able to solve the issue on base penetration without radar detection?

Here’s what researchers found. Nanoworms coated with slime, a polymer coating with tumor targeting molecule, could escape defense mechanism of laboratory mice for up to 24 hours. This period proved to be sufficient in finding potential tumors. Nanoworms link with potential tumors and make it easier to find the diseased organs during body scans.

Well warfare intelligence and design is not made only for the physical world I guess. It is also happening within the human body to race for a cure too – nondetection by the body sensors autodefense mechanism. Great pentagon intelligence lol!