Hi Kali
Thanks for your reply regarding my night sweats this morning. I am going to take your advice and maybe a quick blood test will ease my worries. Hopefully that’s the case.
With regards to your PCR my understanding is this just means that the blood sample taken is not great. Sometimes if bloods are not sent off to the lab quicker or they’re not kept at the right temperature the sample isn’t good enough to perform an accurate test.
I would contact my doctor for clarification.
All the best
Alex
Thanks Scuba!
So that means I need to ask them to retest. Correct? I have been off my medication for a month due to the pleural effusion. I was also recovering from a either a significant virus or pneumonia with a lot of stomach problems on top of it and didn't eat hardly anything for 10 days and then very slow regaining of food intake after that. It has been a long haul. I read the post on fasting and stem cells. So, I am also concerned that the minimal food (a bowl of soup a day was about it and little else for 10 days except water may have activated stem cells and that could have also caused some problems with the cml.
Your thoughts on that?
Yes, a retest is called for ... should be no issue.
On fasting... I am in the middle of a 3 day fast right now. Mostly because I did the opposite during Christmas !!
A theory is that during a fast the body switches from glucose burning to ketone burning and in the absence of calories, old blood cells (mostly white blood cells) are recycled for their proteins. During a multi-day fast, fewer blood cells are made. However, once re-feeding occurs, signals are released to the bone marrow stem cells to get busy and regenerate the immune system:
https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-da...
It is my thinking that both leukemic and normal stem cells are activated. Both are told to divide. In the case of leukemic stem cells, the act of coming out of hiding and dividing exposes them to the killing power of a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). They become vulnerable to apoptosis and die. So fasting may be a way (my opinion only) to cause CML stem cells to be greatly reduced below disease initiating threshold in the presence of a TKI. Repeated cycles of multi-day fasting may be enough to insure treatment free remission success. That's my goal anyway.
It is interesting to note that there is evidence (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5300768/) that fasting alone may be sufficient to impact leukemia negatively by inducing rapid differentiation of higher order cells. Keep in mind leukemia kills (all kinds of leukemia) by an ever increasing burden of non-differentiated blast cells. Getting these cells to differentiate and die off naturally is a strategy currently being researched. Vitamin D helps blast cells (leukemic included) to differentiate and apparently so does fasting. The mechanisms are not well understood.
I have found, however, that fasting along with low carb re-feeding is just better living. My weight is down to near grad school days (I'm thin again), I don't get hungry for late afternoon snacks and I just simply feel energetic. Carbs are fine if you are an athlete - you burn what you eat. But for older folks, burning mostly ketones instead of sugar helps the brain and may just cause CML cells to have a hard time. I will do anything that gives CML cells a hard time ... Just so long as trying is not harmful in itself.
