Saturday, January 12, 2008

Erick Erickson's ruminations from inside the vast right wing conspiracy.

Truly Amazing

Could we be close to a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease? It looks that way.

An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation. This new study highlights the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s. The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.

January 12, 2008 | Filed Under News | Comments Off 

Countdown to getting sick

Christy is sick.

Evelyn has had a cough for a few weeks, which we just assumed were allergies. Then Christy got a cough — a gut wrenching, cough up your lungs cough. Apparently it is a virus. I can’t wait! At least I’ll probably get some codine out of the deal.

Christy isn’t supposed to be taking cough medicine right now, but at about 3 o’clock this morning, she broke down and took some.

Ugh. And I’m suppose to head out of town for work this week. Double ugh.

January 12, 2008 | Filed Under Family | 1 Comment 

Snow in Baghdad

Naturally we can thank global warming.

For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across the Tigris River to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. There were no reports of bloodshed during the snowstorm. The snow showed no favoritism as it dusted neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, faintly falling (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.

But what a sight. What calm.

January 12, 2008 | Filed Under War | Comments Off