INSTITUT RAFAEL & DR TOLEDANO

EXERCISE IS CANCER MEDICINE
 

Everybody knows that exercise is one of the best things we can do for our health. You just read how patients at the Institut Rafael are not only encouraged to exercise, but also to climb high altitude mountains.

There is growing scientific evidence supporting the idea that that exercise is medicine for cancer patients too: “Exercise prescriptions should now be standard of care for all appropriate oncology patients and physical activity should become a vital sign, similar to blood pressure. We are now at a point where we have more evidence in the area of exercise oncology than we had for heart disease to become standard of care”. A drug with similar benefits would likely be prescribed broadly," says one of the authors of this new study published last week by a global coalition of 40 leaders of 17 organisations lead by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).

The authors provide a two-question, assess-advise-refer algorithm, which they say "does not require much time or skill by the oncology clinician."

"How many days during the past week have you performed physical activity where your heart beats faster and your breathing is harder than normal for 30 minutes or more?"

 "How many days during the past week have you performed physical activity to increase muscle strength, such as lifting weights?"

Clinicians then ask themselves: "Would this patient be safe exercising without medical supervision?"

If yes, then the clinician should advise moderate intensity aerobic exercise for up to 30 minutes three times a week and resistance exercise two times a week for 20 to 30 minutes.

E-CIGARETTES - new hints about their danger:  THC &VIT E

Though the investigation is ongoing and the cause remains unknown at this time, today’s report provides the first national comprehensive data on the characteristics of cases reported to CDC, including sex, age, and select substances used in e-cigarette, or vaping products. A second MMWR released today from Wisconsin and Illinois had similar findings regarding THC use and contains more details on the characteristics of cases in those states, including demographics, as well as substances and product types used.

Based on this recent data, CDC recommends people consider refraining from use of e-cigarette or vaping products, particularly those containing THC”.

NEW GENE EDITING TOOL- PRIME EDITING

The gene editing technology has recently seen a major breakthrough. To put it simply, the classic CRISPR, genome editing technology was mostly a pair of scissors, while the new CRISPR tool, ‘the prime editing’ is a pencil. Most impressive to other scientists is prime editing’s ability to insert missing nucleotides or replace a string of disease-causing ones with nucleotides supplied by CRISPR.

”Prime editing’s inventors, led by David Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Anzalone, say it has the potential to correct 89% of known disease-causing genetic variations in DNA, from the single-letter misspelling that causes sickle cell to the superfluous four letters that cause Tay-Sachs disease. All told, they report making 175 edits in human and mouse cells.

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

The aspect of my life that I am focusing on and trying to improve is TIME. I will give you my tips another time, but until then I'll give you a bit from one of my favourite chapters of the book I’m reading, Indistractable, Chapter 9:  “Turn your values into time”.

“Traction draws you towards what you want in life, while distraction pulls you away. (NB: I must say I never did the correlation between traction and distraction meanings).

German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang Goethe believed he could predict someone’s future based on one simple fact. “If I know how you spend your time”, “then I know what might become of you”.

Think of all ways people steal your time. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote: “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Though Seneca was writing more than a thousand years ago, his words are just as applicable today. Thinks of all the locks, security systems, and storage units we use to protect our property and how little we do to protect our time. A study by Promotional Products Association International found only a third of Americans keep a daily schedule, which means the vast majority wake up every morning with no formal plans. Our most precious asset- our time-is unguarded, just waiting to be stolen. If we don’t plan our days, someone else will.

So, we need to make a schedule, but where do we begin? The common approach is to make a to-do list. We write down all the things we want to do and hope we’ll find the time throughout the day to do them. Unfortunately, this method has some serious flaws. Anyone who has tried keeping such a list knows many tasks tend to get pushed from one day to the next, and the next. Instead of starting with what we’re going to do, we should begin with why we’re going to do it. And to do that, we must begin with our values.