Please Donate $29 to Cancer
May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment
LIFT STRONG is a project spearheaded by my friend Alwyn Cosgrove. It is a compilation of articles written by the world’s beat in fitness, nutrition, and training. It is over 800 pages (delivered digitally on CD-ROM). EVERY Penny of the proceeds go to Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
I have personally purchased 2 copies. If you don’t have one (or two) please go to http://wwwLiftStrong.com and get one. As Alwyn says “Why this isn’t the best selling fitness product of all time on the internet remains a mystery to me…”
If you need a reason to act. Check this out…
The treatment in this case is an allogeneic stem cell transplant. It used to be called a bone marrow transplant, but the new name reflects a change in how the cells are harvested from donors. Instead of painfully extracting marrow from a thick bone, usually the hip, the process of stem cell collection now resembles a longer, more involved blood donation.
That’s the technique, but it doesn’t capture the essence of the treatment. The hope with an “allo” transplant is to wipe out the patient’s bone marrow with chemotherapy and then transplant stem cells from a genetically matched donor into his or her body, leaving the patient disease-free, with functioning blood marrow and an intact immune system.
That’s what’s supposed to happen, but the reality is messy and grim. Roughly half of patients do not survive the first year. Typically it’s not because their disease recurs; it’s due to complications resulting from the treatment. Some patients develop graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD, where the donor stem cells begin attacking specific organs — the liver, the gastrointestinal tract and skin. To control GVHD, which can sometimes be fatal, we give patients drugs to suppress the immune system, which then leaves them vulnerable to infection. And infection can kill you just as surely as cancer can.
You can read the rest of this article at the NYTimes website.
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