As the world grapples with the COVID-19 epidemic, and influenza continues to take a heavy toll, researchers are looking at ways of reducing the risk of infection and death. One treatment that seems promising is supplementation of vitamin D. Evidence supporting vitamin D can be found in multiple studies around the world.
A new research paper from scientists in the USA and Hungary looked at previous research into vitamin D. They found evidence that vitamin D may reduce infection and death rates in both COVID-19 and influenza.
This evidence includes that the COVID-19 outbreak began in winter, when vitamin D levels are at their lowest. In the southern hemisphere at the end of summer, infection rates were comparatively low.
Further supporting the case for vitamin D supplementation, it has been found that vitamin D deficiency contributes to acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Fatality rates for COVID-19 and influenza also increase with age and in people with chronic diseases, both of which are associated with higher rates of vitamin D deficiency.
The paper’s authors recommend supplementing vitamin D as a preventive measure, and suggest that higher levels of supplementation might be useful in treating people infected with the coronavirus.
At PIM, we have a particular interest in nutrient supplementation in support of patients with a variety of health conditions. Click here to learn more.
A non-toxic treatment combining high-dose intravenous vitamin C and a diet that mimics fasting can kill cancer cells and slow the progression of a common type of aggressive tumours, according to new research from California and Italy.
The researchers studied mice with cancers that have mutations in a gene known as KRAS. Around one-quarter of cancers have this type of KRAS mutation, and this figure grows to around 40% for colo-rectal cancers. KRAS-mutant cancers are resistant to most therapies, and patients with KRAS-mutant cancers have a lower survival rate.
A common method of treating these cancers is a combination of high-dose vitamin C and chemotherapy. Chemotherapy can cause severe adverse side-effects as it harms healthy cells and cancer cells alike.
A severely calorie-restricted diet has been shown to have benefits for heart health and can reverse type 2 diabetes, and can also make cancer cells more vulnerable. However, patients already weakened by illness can find it difficult to fast.
The researchers developed a plant-based diet that mimics the effects of fasting by minimising carbohydrates and proteins, replacing them with fats from olives and flax seed.
When used alone, the diet and the vitamin C therapy caused a minor increase in cell death, but when applied together the effect was much more dramatic, killing almost all cancer cells and slowing tumour growth.
If replicated in humans this research could provide further tools in the fight against cancer.
At PIM we have a particular interest in injectable nutrient therapies such as high-dose vitamin C, as well as the influence of diet on all aspects of our health and wellbeing. Contact us to learn more.
Parkinson’s disease is a condition that affects the brain, with the death of cells that secrete dopamine leading to impairment of motor functions, along with other symptoms. But a growing body of research points to the ‘second brain’ we have in our gut as the potential starting place of the disease.
Scientists from Sweden and the US have recently published the results of a study suggesting that the enteric nervous system is affected in the very earliest stages of Parkinson’s. The enteric nervous system is a collection of hundreds of millions of neurons in the gut, that regulates the digestive system and operates independently of the brain.
By observing gene expression in mice and analysing brain tissue of healthy people and those with various stages of Parkinson’s disease, the researchers found changes in enteric neurons at the earliest stages of the condition.
This insight suggests that the disease begins the gut before reaching the brain via the vagus nerve.
The researchers also found that another type of brain cell, known as oligodendrocytes, were affected before the dopamine-secreting neurons. This offers new possibilities for therapies for the disease in the future.
At PIM we have a particular interest in the gut and its effects on our health and wellbeing. Contact us to find out more.
Vitamin D is highly likely to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and death rates, according to new research from Trinity College Dublin.
People in sunny climates have lower levels of vitamin D and higher rates of vitamin D deficiency, the research shows, despite the fact that our bodies make the vitamin in response to sunlight.
Vitamin D can support the immune system and plays an important role in fighting viral infections. Researchers believe this is due to its influence over our bodies’ cytokine response, which causes the severe consequences of COVID-19.
The Irish research team compared infection and death rates from COVID-19 with data on vitamin D levels of various European countries. They found that the countries with higher rates of vitamin D deficiency had higher rates of infection and death.
They also noted that regions with sunnier climates had higher rates of vitamin D deficiency. This may be because countries in colder climates, such as Norway, Finland and Sweden, are more likely to use supplements or have foods fortified with vitamin D.
The researchers are calling on the Irish government to update health guidelines around vitamin D intake. They say this will have broad health benefits, as well as potentially reducing the severity of COVID-19 infections and death rates in that country.
The Irish research is supported by a study at the Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, which noted the association between low levels of vitamin D and high rates of infection and death from COVID-19 in European countries.
Health bodies in the UK have already increased the recommended intake of vitamin D since the coronavirus outbreak.
As we head into winter, maintaining a healthy level of vitamin D is especially important.
At PIM, we have a particular interest in diet and nutrition. Contact us to learn more.
Bacteria living in the small intestine support the generation of regulatory T-cells (Tregs) that suppress auto-immune reactions and inflammation. New research sheds light on how our bodies communicate with our gut bacteria.
The new study, from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has discovered that a chemical produced by the bacteria from bile boosts the local generation of the immunosuppressive immune cells in the colon. These Tregs help dampen chronic intestinal inflammation, a major driver of colorectal cancers.
Bile is produced by the liver and helps to digest fats in the small intestine. Some of this bile is metabolised by gut bacteria, resulting in a substance known as isoDCA.
Dendritic cells in the colon induce immune responses in response to bile acids, but the researchers found that isoDCA blocks this response, causing the dendritic cells to go into an anti-inflammatory state and produce Tregs instead.
This new knowledge could help researchers to develop new classes of treatments that could help reduce the risk of colon cancers in future. It also reinforces the importance of diet to gut health.
At PIM we have a particular interest in the gut microbiome and its effects on our health and wellbeing. Contact us to find out more.
Eat less sugar! Eat more protein! Don’t eat too much fat! Fat is fine, eat less carbs!
Every day we are confronted with messages about our diets and how they affect our health.
Often the advice is contradictory and confusing, making it difficult for us to know where to begin.
It’s not just consumers – understanding the effects of diet on our health is difficult for researchers and medical professionals too. Understanding this difficulty and the complexity that underlies it is a helpful step towards making healthy decisions for ourselves.
Our bodies are incredibly complex and the choices of foods we consume to fuel them are almost limitless. This makes it difficult to understand whether particular foods and food groups are ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ choices.
While specific links have been found in many instances – vitamin C prevents scurvy, vitamin D deficiency causes rickets – in many cases there are multiple factors to consider. Obesity, osteoporosis, heart disease and diabetes are examples of conditions where diet plays a role but a clear-cut solution is not available.
The difficulty in studying the role of nutrition in conditions like these is in part due to the huge number of variables. To study nutritional impacts, it is simply not possible to place thousands of people on exactly the same diet for an extended period, with exactly the same exercise regimen and exactly the same exposure to other health factors such as water and air quality.
Instead, researchers must use other methods such as observational studies, which as the name suggests, rely on observation of people’s habits, largely through self-reporting.
Observational studies are useful but have serious limitations.
Confusing the issue is the role of industry in influencing not just the conversation about food and health, but the research itself. Often when you read about a new study suggesting that a particular food is better or worse for you than was previously believed, the research was instigated or funded by an industry group or a specific company. While the research itself is often accurate, the way it is presented to and published by the media can be highly misleading.
Added to all of this is the fact that people are all different. We respond to different nutrients in different ways. What might be fine for one person could be damaging to another.
So, what can we do? The main thing we can do as consumers is to take advice from qualified professionals. Be wary of news headlines that shout about superfoods and dietary matters. Journalists are not trained to understand scientific papers and often rely solely on the PR spin presented to them. As a general rule, an article saying a specific food or drink will make you live longer or prevent a disease is not accurately reflecting the science. It just isn’t that simple!
At PIM, we consider diet and nutrition to be vital to good health, and we devise personalised nutrition plans for patients with a variety of health conditions. Click here to learn more.
For a more detailed explanation of the difficulties facing researchers in nutrition, click here.
COVID-19 is a public health challenge on a scale that has never been seen before. But aside from the virus itself, the pandemic also poses some other, less obvious risks to our health and wellbeing.
Around the world, stories are beginning to emerge about the alarming drop in numbers of people seeking medical help for serious illnesses out of fear or concern for COVID-19.
Doctors fear that anxiety about COVID-19 will lead to an increase in deaths from heart attacks and cancers.
In Australia, there has been a 50% drop in the number of new cancer patients – sadly not due to a drop in cancers, but because people are scared of being infected by coronavirus in a hospital setting, or because they don’t want to place a burden on the health system in a time of crisis.
This trend is also reflected in heart attack patients, with a drop of 30%.
Such large numbers of people delaying treatment for cancer is likely to lead to a similarly dramatic increase in deaths as opportunities for early intervention are missed.
For those delaying treatment out of concern for overwhelming the hospital system, the irony is that this may lead to increased demand down the track, potentially overwhelming the system anyway and leading to yet more delays in treatment.
So far, the attention has focussed on heart and cancer patients, but the phenomenon is likely to extend to other conditions, leading to poor health outcomes for thousands of people.
Patients who suffer from chronic and complex conditions requiring ongoing treatment are at risk. Other suffering minor ailments are also likely to find themselves suffering unnecessarily, or finding their health deteriorating in the absence of timely intervention.
Put simply, COVID-19 is not the only story when it comes to your health. Delaying medical treatment puts you at risk.
The good news is, you can and should seek medical treatment safely. At PIM, our staff are highly trained in infection control and we acted early and decisively to limit the risk of transmission. Combined with the very low level of community transmission in South Australia, a visit to PIM is very low risk – potentially much lower than the risk of not seeking treatment for your condition!
We also offer remote consultations for anyone who prefers not to attend in person.
COVID-19 is serious. However, while it is important to reduce your risk of catching and spreading this virus, it is no less important to maintain good health in other ways as well.
To find out more about safeguarding your health during this pandemic, contact us.
Even before the coronavirus imposed unprecedented changes on our lives, it was well known that workers who felt pressure to be “switched on” constantly were at higher risk of burnout – a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion generally brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.
While many workplaces have been focusing on maintaining productivity, for many workers, the sudden and unplanned switch to working from home has raised the risk of burnout. This risk can be reduced by taking some simple steps.
The increased connectivity offered by mobile devices had blurred the lines between work time and personal time long before the virus appeared. Now that countless workers have shifted to working from home, it’s more important than ever to safeguard their wellbeing.
Workers who suddenly find themselves working from home may feel like the days all run together. The daily and weekly rituals that help us compartmentalise our lives – the commute, Monday morning banter, weekend sports – have disappeared. Many workers feel guilty about being at home and compensate by working longer hours.
Prolonged periods of stress, combined with uncertainty and anxiety about the future can lead to burnout. The good news is, once this is understood there are actions we can take to reduce the risk and adapt to the new normal.
If you suddenly find yourself working from home, replacing your old work-week rituals can help define the boundaries of work and personal life. By establishing start-of-day and end-of-day rituals, you are reinforcing to yourself when you are ‘at work’ or ‘at home’, even if they are both the same physical space.
Different rituals will work for different people, so develop some that work for you. Start-of-day rituals might include replacing your morning commute with a walk around the neighbourhood, continuing to wake, shower and dress for work at your usual time, and preparing a to-do list for the day ahead.
End-of day rituals can be as simple as closing all your browser tabs, shutting down your computer, or putting your phone into airplane mode for an hour or two of family time.
The actions themselves are less important than the thought you put into them and the value they provide for you.
If you have a home office, it is easier to define your workplace within the home, but for many people the workplace is now the kitchen table, making it harder to define a boundary between work and home.
Regardless of the facilities available to you, the key is to define your workspace and make that distinction clear to other members of the household. Even if it just a specific chair at the table, defining the space helps you and others to know when you are working and when you are not.
One thing that can help workers avoid overwork and burnout is to see that they are being productive each day.
It is much easier to switch off at the end of the working day if you feel you have made progress on your work. Starting with a to-do list and crossing out items as you complete them helps to provide an awareness of your productivity and reduce feelings of ‘work from home guilt’.
Allow yourself a treat when reaching pre-set milestones. This could be anything from an afternoon snack to a walk with the dog or simply five minutes sitting in the garden – whatever motivates you!
Working from home dishes up distractions that you don’t normally face at work. Children, pets, that one little repair job you’ve been putting off – they can all prevent you from focusing deeply on an important task.
When you need to concentrate deeply, take some steps to reduce distractions. If you can’t close the office door as a signal to family members that you don’t wish to be disturbed, you could make a sign for the back of your chair. Talking to family about this will help too.
Social media notifications are a major distraction. Switch them off or put your phone into airplane mode for the duration of the work session. Switching off email notifications is another way to reduce distraction.
Many workers feel pressured into checking and responding to emails promptly, whether they arrive in working hours or not. One highly effective way to reduce stress and burnout is to stop checking your work email out of working hours.
Make it clear to your colleagues that out of hours emails will be responded to the following working day. It might be helpful to talk to them about the reasons why. If you are tempted to send emails outside normal working hours, consider that you might be adding to someone else’s stress levels.
Turning off push notifications for emails on your phone and using auto-reply to respond to out of hours emails can also help.
Take a break. Nobody can work productively all the time. We need time to ourselves to switch off, relax and regroup. The coronavirus pandemic is a major change to our entire society and it takes time to adapt.
Make sure you take regular breaks throughout the day, and time off on weekends.
Just because you work from home now, it doesn’t mean you are at work all the time. Establishing new habits will help you – and your workmates – to tell the difference.
There’s good news and bad news in the latest research on brain deterioration. The bad news is that signs of brain ageing appear much earlier than generally thought – in the late 40s. The good news is that the decline may be halted and even reversed with dietary choices.
Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of almost 1000 people aged between 18 and 80. They found that age-related damage to neural pathways occurred at different rates, depending on how the brain cells obtained their energy.
Neurons reliant on glucose were increasingly unstable over time, while those who got their energy from ketones – produced by the liver when the diet is low in carbohydrates – maintained more stable networks.
Suspecting that neurons gradually lose the ability to metabolise glucose, the researchers tested whether providing energy in the form of more efficient ketones would improve brain networks. They found that improved network stability was evident even in younger brains.
As is often the case in medicine, the situation is complex. For many people, a low carb diet often results in less fruit and vegetables being consumed, posing risks for heart health.
More research is needed to provide a definitive answer – in the meantime it is important to seek qualified advice about dietary changes. At PIM, we consider diet and nutrition to be vital to good health, and we devise personalised nutrition plans for patients with a variety of health conditions. Click here to learn more.
Cancer is costing more than ever – for patients, health systems and whole countries – but is the growing cancer “industry” making life better for patients, or even improving their chances of survival?
According to John Horgan, writing in the latest issue of Scientific American, the enormous amounts of money spent on research and treatment have resulted in little benefit for patients overall, and in many cases actually make things worse.
In spite of the billions of dollars spent each year, Horgan argues that deaths from cancer have barely changed since the early 1990s. The reduction in cancer deaths in recent decades followed many decades of increases, and the totals can be explained by the rise and fall in the rates of tobacco smoking – take smoking out of the picture and cancer mortality has barely changed.
Horgan argues that the rise of widespread screening for cancers such as breast and prostate cancer have led to widespread overdiagnosis, leading in turn to unnecessary chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. He points to a 2013 study that concluded: if 2,000 women have mammograms over a period of 10 years, one woman’s life will be saved by a positive diagnosis. Meanwhile 10 healthy women will be treated unnecessarily, and more than 200 “will experience important psychological distress including anxiety and uncertainty for years because of false positive findings.”
Increasingly, the evidence shows that universal screening is actually doing more harm than good, potentially cutting short more lives than they extend. While studies of tests for a specific cancer often look at deaths caused by that cancer, tests such as mammograms may show a reduction in deaths from breast cancer. Crucially, they do not show deaths from other causes resulting directly or indirectly from the diagnosis and treatment – heart disease, infections, other forms of cancer and suicide.
Horgan covers a lot more ground in his article, with references to various studies. We recommend reading it in full, as it is a complex subject. Click here to read the article.
Dairy milk is an important part of a balanced diet – or is it?
There is little evidence that consuming dairy foods is necessary – or even helpful – for bone health. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine examined more than 100 studies relating to milk consumption, with some surprising results.
Countries with the highest milk intake, such as Sweden, have a higher rate of hip fractures than countries like China, with the lowest rates of milk drinking. And while children who drink more milk grow taller, their risk of fractures as the age actually increases – due to their height, falls can cause more damage to their bones.
As for reduced-fat vs full-fat milk, while the Australian government’s dietary guidelines recommend reduced-fat variants, research shows that full-fat milk offers lower risk for obesity and is associated with less weight gain than the low-fat alternatives, possibly because the full-fat milk makes you feel more full and less likely to seek out further snacks.
At PIM, we consider diet and nutrition to be vital to good health, and we devise personalised nutrition plans for patients with a variety of health conditions. Click here to learn more.
Norovirus is the most common cause of gastroenteritis, causing vomiting, diarrhoea and nausea. There is currently no effective treatment.
New research from Korea suggests vitamin A could help to prevent the virus from replicating, offering hope for new treatment methods.
Researchers looked at the effect of vitamin A on norovirus in the lab as well as in mice. They found that the vitamin reduced the quantity of virus in both instances. They also found that the makeup of the mice’s gut microbiome was altered by the introduction of vitamin A, suggesting that the vitamin helps the gut bacteria mount a defence against the virus.
Our injectable nutrient clinic supports patients with a variety of health conditions. Click here to learn more.
Last week we posted two articles suggesting that intravenous vitamin C may be of benefit in supporting patients infected with the new coronavirus. Now clinical trials are taking place in China to determine the effectiveness of high dose vitamin C in these cases.
ZhiYong Peng from Zhongnan Hospital is carrying out the trial. He hypothesises that vitamin C infusion will improve the prognosis for coronavirus patients due to its anti-inflammatory properties, as described in our blog posts about coronavirus and sepsis {link to these posts}
The trial will take place over seven days, with some patients receiving an intravenous dose of vitamin C and a control group receiving only water.
As there is currently no targeted antiviral treatment for this virus, the outcome of this study will be very interesting and potentially valuable in the global fight against this disease.
Migraines and severe headaches affect around one in six adults in the US, and around a quarter of people suffering report that certain foods can trigger their symptoms.
The exact causes of migraines remain unclear, although there is evidence that inflammation plays a role, an IgG antibodies may correlate with inflammation.
A range of studies have shown improvement of symptoms in migraine patients when treated with nutritional supplements such as CoQ10 and riboflavin. Conversely, studies show a connec-tion between allergens such as house dust and wheat with increased frequency of migraines.
Consuming the right kinds of fats also seems to be critical in migraine patients, particularly omega-3 fatty acids.
At PIM we offer IgG food immunology testing and provide support to patients with a variety of complex conditions. Click here to learn more.
Vitamin C is one of the most widely recognised nutrients in the world and is vital to our health.
Since 1747, when Scottish doctor James Lind showed that eating citrus fruit prevented scurvy, our understanding of the important role of vitamin C has grown dramatically, but there is still much to learn, and cause for optimism for patients with cancer and many other diseases.
Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, is well known as an antioxidant. Beyond this role, its use in medicine has been debated for decades. Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, claimed that high doses could prevent and treat many illnesses, but mainstream medicine largely ignored him.
In the 1960s, Canadian doctor William McCormick noticed that cancer patients often had very low levels of vitamin C. In the 1970s, Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron hypothesised that vitamin C could suppress cancer development, later joining forces with Linus Pauling to publish a study showing that cancer patients treated with high doses enjoyed a better quality of life and a four-fold increase in survival time.
Unfortunately, another study by the well-known Mayo Clinic showed no effect from vitamin C on cancers, and enthusiasm for research into this form of treatment dropped away.
More recently, enthusiasm has begun to grow again. The Mayo study relied on oral doses of vitamin C, while Cameron and Pauling’s trial delivered the nutrient via both orally and intravenously. Studies have since shown that there is a limit to the amount of vitamin C that can be absorbed through the gut – to reach the levels of the vitamin in the blood required to have an effect on cancer cells, it is necessary to bypass the gut and deliver it directly to the bloodstream.
With this new knowledge, studies over recent years have shown improvements in quality of life, by minimising pain and protecting healthy tissues from toxicity caused by chemotherapy. Research is also starting to show the pathways and mechanisms by which vitamin C could affect cancer cells.
There is now a growing optimism among researchers that further research into high-dose vitamin C could deliver improved outcomes for cancer patients.
We are particularly encouraged to see this information being published on official government health websites, as mainstream medicine finally acknowledges the potential of vitamin C.
