Health Problems
- Thread starter Kuriin
- Start date
moonarchia
The Scientific Shitlord
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Izo
Tranny Chaser
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It’s probably like smoking, rule of thumb. Decline rate in lung function trends like your non-smoking peers when you are equally many smoking years smoke free, but the smoking induced loss is not recovered. Replace smoking with cancer + CAR. I pulled that last part out of my ass for your pleasure.
sleevedraw
Revolver Ocelot
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The exciting thing about CAR-T is that it (academically, at least) enables what needs to happen for cancer to be cured - i.e., a 100% kill rate where treatment (whether that's surgery or chemo) mops up 99.99% of the cancer, and the immune system is responsible for mopping up the last .01% on its own.
Highly anaplastic cancer cells often have ways of being able to evade detection. One of the big ways is via downregulation of MHC-1 (basically a fingerprint receptor that the immune system can use to determine if a cell is acting normally). CAR-T cells can still glom on thanks to their engineered receptor, even if the cancer cells downregulate MHC. This works really well for blood cancers because they are all clonal - a plasma cell in the marrow becomes abnormal and churns out a bunch of cells that all have the same genetic makeup. So if that cancer's main immune escape mechanism is MHC-1 downregulation, it has no effect on the CAR-T cells. Solid tumors are a harder target because the cells often have different mutations in different cells despite coming from one contiguous area.
The two main limitations of CAR are currently:
1) The chance that the CAR cells themselves may become cancerous (although that risk appears to be low...thus far)
2) That they won't persist long enough in the body to complete the 100% killing blow - the current focus is trying to find ways to make them more persistent
Highly anaplastic cancer cells often have ways of being able to evade detection. One of the big ways is via downregulation of MHC-1 (basically a fingerprint receptor that the immune system can use to determine if a cell is acting normally). CAR-T cells can still glom on thanks to their engineered receptor, even if the cancer cells downregulate MHC. This works really well for blood cancers because they are all clonal - a plasma cell in the marrow becomes abnormal and churns out a bunch of cells that all have the same genetic makeup. So if that cancer's main immune escape mechanism is MHC-1 downregulation, it has no effect on the CAR-T cells. Solid tumors are a harder target because the cells often have different mutations in different cells despite coming from one contiguous area.
The two main limitations of CAR are currently:
1) The chance that the CAR cells themselves may become cancerous (although that risk appears to be low...thus far)
2) That they won't persist long enough in the body to complete the 100% killing blow - the current focus is trying to find ways to make them more persistent
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I really hope not to face something like that again as my screenings have been all clear. One good thing was my new Chemo Oncologist said that if it should come back they have ways to attack it that do not require surgery.
moonarchia
The Scientific Shitlord
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Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Mounjaro increased to 5mg and off all pills except metformin which I'm happy with. Gonna see if I can really lower my a1c now.
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Izo
Tranny Chaser
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Grats, dude. Here's the last piece of the puzzle. It's what you (don't) put in your mouth that does it.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Oh yeah. Thankfully mounjaro is doing a lot of work there. I just am not interested in bad food most of the times now. And when I am, I can't eat very much of it.
Also I fully realize I got myself here. I am very thankful for this medication though. For the first time since being diagnosed I feel my health improving for the better.
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TheNozz
Bronze Baron of the Realm
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In the whole time I was wearing the monitor, I felt the need to press the "record event" button once.
Got my results back last Friday and spoke to the medical staff today.
Everything looks great for now, there were no AFIB incidents present at all, not even when I thought I had something wrong and pressed the button.
I can also stop taking Pradaxa, a fairly strong blood thinner (that as I mentioned I thought is fucking with my stomach), for now. It's possible that they may ask me to take a baby aspirin once a day, but won't know for sure until sometime later this week.
So, nearly four months out after the procedure, it looks like I'm tentatively cured, but it will take all the way to 12/3/26 for cardiology to make their final determination and then discharge me.
If anyone else ever gets diagnosed with AFIB (Atrial Fibrillation), feel free to tag me for my input/advice.
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