In scleroderma (from the Greek word meaning "hardened skin"), the immune system's suicidal attack leads to a death of the skin, esophagus, heart, and tissues in the lungs and elsewhere. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatry faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mind-body interface in illness.
The Little Girl Too Good to Be True
Although she did not realize it, in her twenties Jacqueline du Pré was also in the autumn of her life. Jackie's mother, Iris, suffered the death of her own father while she was still in the maternity ward with Jackie.
Stress and Emotional Competence
Alan, a forty-seven-year-old engineer, was diagnosed a few years ago with cancer of the esophagus—the esophagus that carries food from the throat to the stomach. Stimulated by ACTH, this gland now secretes the corticoid hormones (corticoid, from "cortex"), the chief of which is cortisol.
Buried Alive
As the ALS Society website explains, “A-myotrophic comes from the Greek language. Sue was the second of five children born to her parents within ten years.
Never Good Enough
The authors concluded that "women with breast cancer need not fear that stressful experiences will hasten a return of their disease."1 Dr. Nearly four hundred women with a history of breast cancer were asked what they believed had caused their malignancy. Only a small minority of women have a high genetic risk of breast cancer, and only a small minority of women with breast cancer—about 7 percent—get the disease for genetic reasons.
Again, on psychological grounds, the researchers were 96 percent successful in identifying who was and who was not diagnosed with breast cancer.5. "Extreme suppression of anger" was the most commonly identified characteristic of breast cancer patients in a 1974 British study. Even in the small minority of cases where it is a major predisposing factor, heredity alone cannot explain who gets cancer. of the breast and who is not.
Other relatives with the same gene, older than her, have not developed breast cancer. One person whose real childhood history would likely be missed on breast cancer patients' self-administered questionnaires is the former U.S. president.
You Are Part of This Too, Mom
Betty Krawczyk was born in southern Louisiana, which at the time, she says, "was mostly a big swamp." "I was not raised to be a protester," she writes in Clayoquot. I will treat it holistically and do the best I can with it.' She asked John and I to support her decision and try not to interfere.”. I tried to push her to look at some other options and then she was just very, very angry and persistent and yelled at me - she had never yelled at me before.
I remember asking Margaret: 'Why didn't she come and tell me?' and she said: 'She thought because Doris is your sister that it would cause a big ruckus between you two.'" She would say, 'I feel like I don't know what cancer is, but it's here and it looks like it's visiting me.' She said: 'I invited the cancer into my body.' I remember being terrible. ed and said, 'Barbara, I don't understand.' She said, 'Well, it's because I experience it as part of my own life and that you are part of it too, Mom. Do you want me to call the doctor?' She said: 'No, the man who came for me and I told him I wasn't ready.' She said that she was ready now.
She told me that she was ready for him now, and she died at eight o'clock that morning. We were talking about my father, and my mother came into the room and she said, 'You know, when you kids talk about your father, I always felt angry with you, because your father was a good man.' She also said: 'I don't think I've paid enough attention to any of you.
Stress, Hormones, Repression and Cancer
The so-called primary immune organs are the bone marrow and the thymus gland, located in the upper chest in front of the heart. None of these chemicals are restricted to any area or organ of the body. The center of the PNI system is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal nexus: the HPA axis.
Steroid hormones released by the activity of the HPA axis help regulate apoptosis in a number of ways. A two-part article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1996 discussed the role of the PNI system in health and disease. Cancers of the female gynecological organs such as the ovaries and uterus are also hormone-related.
Malignancies of the hematological (blood cell producing) system such as leukemia and lymphoma are also hormone dependent, and are strongly influenced by cortisol produced in the adrenal gland. Rather, there are wide variations in growth rate depending on what happens in the life of the host.
Something Good Comes Out of This
Also disturbing are the findings published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, that men treated aggressively for prostate cancer had a higher chance of dying from other cancers than men who received no medical intervention.4. Now that's an interesting metaphor, anatomically, when used by someone who has prostate cancer. Like the secretion of hormones by the adrenal glands and ovaries, the synthesis of testosterone by the testes is under the complex feedback control of the hypothalamo-pituitary system in the brain.
Coincidentally, in a small series of patients, surgical removal of the pituitary gland in the brain produced positive results in the treatment of prostate cancer.6. Postal Service planned to issue a stamp urging “annual checkups and tests” for prostate cancer. It was said of him that he couldn't handle not being at the center of the action.
Francis is one of three or four men I have ever seen with testicular cancer. When it comes to testicular cancer, it's not just cyclists who are in the denial business.
Is There a “Cancer Personality”?
Per Cent Solution
Crohn's is one of the two main forms of inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD. In ulcerative colitis, the more common of the two, the inflammation begins in the rectum and spreads upward. IBD can be associated with inflammation in the joints, the eyes and the skin.
The inflammation of IBD is the result of dysregulated immune function in the intestines. Whatever is in the intestines simply passes through and still belongs to the outside world. On the other hand, the nervous system is closely involved in the regulation of immune responses and inflammation.
They are implicated both in the regulation of local inammation and in the body's stress response. Chronically stressful emotional patterns can induce inflammatory bowel disease through mediation of the PNI supersystem and activation of pro-inflammatory molecules by stress.
It’s All in Her Head
They tried me on three or four of the different medications for it. Irritable bowel syndrome is thought to affect up to 17 percent of the population in the industrialized world and is the most common reason patients are referred to gastroenterologists. When parts of the intestine are artificially distended, the response pattern in the brains of persons with functional abdominal pain typically varies from the brain activity of persons who have no pain complaints.3.
When study subjects experience distension of their rectums, a PET scan will show which part of the brain registers a response. Activation in this part of the brain means that some emotionally significant event is taking place. Researchers comparing healthy controls with re ux patients found that resting esophageal sphincter pressure was more often low in GERD subjects.
Gut feelings magnify perceptions that the emotional centers of the brain are important and relay through the hypothalamus. At the end of November, only a month after the publication of the enthusiastic article in The Medical Post, the FDA forced the manufacturer to withdraw the drug.
I Shall Die First from the Top
One of the first structures to deteriorate in Alzheimer's disease is the hippocampus, a gray matter center in the temporal lobe of the brain, located on either side next to the ears. No one should have power over him – the power to melt self-control, the power to hurt…. From diagnosis to death, life expectancy in Alzheimer's disease averages eight years, regardless of the age at which the disease first strikes.
A few years ago, the finding that Alzheimer's-affected brains contain higher-than-normal levels of aluminum prompted many people to throw away their aluminum cookware in hopes of protecting against the disease. According to the Austrian researchers, "There is little doubt that the immune system plays a role in the neurodegenerative process in Alzheimer's disease."9. In human beings with Alzheimer's and in animal models of dementia, there is excessive production of cortisol, which parallels the degree of damage to the hippocampus.
Researchers from Ohio State University have suggested that in Alzheimer's disease, as in other autoimmune diseases, negative emotions are a major risk factor for the eventual onset of the disease.10. The then-future president once described himself as “the quiet, empty center of the hurricane.” Morris writes that there was always an "immense insularity" in Ronald Reagan's personality.
Self or Non-Self: The Immune System Confused
Celia, a woman in her thirties, experienced an episode of arteritis, or generalized inflammation of the arteries, another autoimmune process. The reader will have noticed how often in the personal stories told in this book there was an early separation of parents, abandonment or even death of the mother or father. Emotions exactly parallel and complement other components of the PNI network: like the immune and nervous systems, emotions protect the organism from external threats.
Emotions, and the physical cells and tissues that make them possible, evolved as part of the apparatus of survival. That emotions cause changes in immune activity is just the other side of the same coin. To illustrate the parallel and complementary protective duties of the emotional system and the immune apparatus, we can compare the role of immune cells to that of an emotion such as anger.
Or anger is aroused in an animal when a stranger of the same species, from outside the family or herd or herd, invades its territory. The first essential task of the immune system is also to distinguish self from non-self.
