The Weekly Dose - Episode 49

The Weekly Dose...

... the latest from Dr Karan

  Here is your weekly dose...  

Hi all!Here is your weekly dose of the Sunday Six! A few things I found interesting this week. If you enjoy this please feel free to forward this to friends. families and enemies alike!If you've enjoyed any of my content over the years, I know you will enjoy my new book "This Book May Save Your Life", available to pre-order here: My First Ever Book!If you enjoy interesting conversations and podcast, check out my brand new podcast "The Referral With Dr Karan"!**You'll find more in depth analysis of some of these subjects on my social platforms in the links just below, including Dr Karan Investigates! for deep dives into interesting topics on my YouTube channel.**

When Pigs Fly...

When pigs fly. (i.e in your dreams, it'll never happen etc)A beautifully bizarre English phrase that is replicated in other languages in stranger ways!Spanish: When frogs grow hair!Italian: When hens piss!German: I've seen horses puke beforeMoroccan: When a goat flies..Turkish: When a fish climbs a poplar treeTaiwanese: When a 7-11 closesRussian: When a crayfish whistles on the mountainHungarian: When red snow falls.. (ominous!)Brazilian: Not even when a cow coughs!Costa Rica: On February 30th!Japanese: When the train is late! (confident!)Egypt: When you see your earlobe!Lithuanian: When lizards fartOk..you get the point! What are the strangest phrases you've come across? 

A Vaccine For Pancreatic Cancer?!...

Pancreatic cancer prognosis is abysmal. It is one of the most aggressive cancers out there and more often than not patients present with advanced disease that has more than likely spread elsewhere.Despite advances in surgery, therapeutics and diagnosis...we haven't progressed much over the past few decades in treating pancreatic cancer and we desperately need more solutions.Enter pancreatic cancer vaccines.A team or researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre have been developing custom-made cancer vaccines using proteins in the pancreatic tumours, called neoantigens, to alert the immune system that cancer cells are foreign.The hope is that the vaccine will reduce the risk of the cancer returning after the main tumour is removed by surgery. The mRNA vaccines train the body to protect itself against its own abnormal cancer cells.Results from the phase 1 trial, reported May 10 in Nature, suggest that the vaccines cause an effective and lasting immune response. In 8 of 16 patients studied, the vaccines activated powerful immune cells, called T cells, that can recognise the pancreatic cancer specific to a patient.These patients also showed delayed recurrence of their pancreatic cancers, suggesting that the T cells activated by the vaccines may be having the desired effect — to keep pancreatic cancers in check.Next step would be a larger, randomised clinical trial involving patients at multiple sites in various countries (planned for this summer!) These mRNA vaccines can trigger T cells to recognise their pancreatic cancers as foreign. Moreover, the vaccines stimulated many such T cells, and these T cells could last in patients up to two years later, even though patients received chemotherapy after vaccination.At a median follow-up of 18 months, in patients with such vaccine-expanded T cells, the cancers had not come back. In contrast, cancers came back approximately 13 months after surgery in patients where vaccines did not expand T cells.I've seen first hand at work how devastating pancreatic cancer can be and how urgently we need better treatments so this is hugely exciting! 

Heroes Vs Villains...

There are four characters in every story: The victim, the villain, the hero and the guide.These four characters live inside us. If we play the victim, we're doomed to fail.If we play the villain, we will not create genuine bonds.But if we play the hero or guide, our lives will flourish.The hardest part is being self aware enough to know which character we are playing.Whether we like it or not, the lives we live are stories!Villains and heroes actually have the exact same back story.  The villain & hero have pain in their backstory so the difference between the villain heroes one things how they respond to this pain.The villain says "the world hurt me I'm going to hurt it back" and the hero says "the world hurt me and I'm not going to let this happen to anyone else". Often all that separates these two opposing entities is how you decide to react to the pain.This is summarised from Donald Miller's book "Hero on a mission" and definitely provokes an interesting perspective on life! How do you react to disappointment and negativity in your life? 

Your Personality Type...

Have you ever taken a Myers Briggs Personality test?If you have, I'm sorry to say that it's a load of hogwash.It was invented by a woman called Catherine Briggs who worked on it with her daughter Isabel Myers. Interestingly, neither had any particular expertise in social science or psychology.The inspiration for its development came when Katharine Briggs met her future son-in-law and didn't think he fitted with the family and wanted to find out why...The MBTI (myers birggs type index) basically divides people into particular types of categories:  extrovert versus introvert, sensing versus intuitive, thinking versus feeling and judging versus perceiving.Sadly, the whole thing is pseudoscience and nonsensical because emotions and personality traits are on overlapping spectrum...and they are rarely binary. We aren't Mr Men (Mr Angry, Miss Extrovert etc).Despite the evidence against it and lack of scientific grounding, it is used by HR departments around the world. People and their traits are not an either or.  Additionally, it's also self reporting so if you think for example that you're an extrovert that is pretty much the result that you're going to get.The real problem is about half the people who take it a second time come out with a completely different result so it clearly doesn't work at all! 

More Harsh Truths...

1. You need fewer friends and more people that force you to level up.If you're lucky enough, these may be one and the same. As I've grown older, my circle has gotten increasingly smaller.Between seeing my family, taking care of my dog, work and social media, I have less time than ever and when I do spend time with friends, I want to be surrounded by those who are intellectual sparring partners that help me question my assumptions, educate me about various things and make me elevate myself.The company you keep dictates your growth and vice versa.2. Show up early - alwaysMaybe it is years of surgery training drilled into me and being ready well in advance of the next operation but in life too, being early for things serves a purpose.I don't think I've ever regretted being early for an event or a meeting and in the long run the rewards are handsome.3. Failing isn't always a learning opportunitySometimes in life you fail. No growth, no learning..just pain.The learning and growth doesn't necessarily have to come from the loss or failure but from outlasting the pain and darkness of that moment. The Vicious Cycle Of Sleep Deprivation & Bad Diets... How does sleep affect our diet?Evidence suggests that reducing sleep led to an increase in eating due to increased activity in the reward centers of the brain specific to food, along with alterations in hormones that control feelings of fullness (ghrelin & leptin).In other words, people who sleep less feel hungrier, and tend to crave foods that are high in sugar and fat.The opposite question...How does diet affect sleep? ...is also interesting to ponder...Getting more and better sleep isn’t always just a matter of going to bed earlier: It turns out that diet is an under-recognized contributor to good or bad sleep.Studies have suggested that eating more fibre and less saturated fat and sugar during the day results in deeper, less disturbed sleep at night. Additionally, protein-rich foods such as nuts and seeds, fish, poultry and eggs contain tryptophan, an amino acid from which the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin is produced in the brain.Other foods — including tomatoes, pineapple, bananas, apples, vegetable oils, nuts — contain melatonin itself. Eating such melatonin-rich foods *may* also boost your own melatonin levels, although research on this is sparse (but these types of foods are still high in fibre and anti-oxidants so even if they don't affect your melatonin levels they are still damn good for you!) Ultimately, bad sleep and poor diet can be a vicious cycle: Lack of sleep leads to poor dietary choices, which in turn causes low quality sleep.But perhaps through better dietary choice we can interrupt this cycle and turn it around. Eating well throughout the day could produce sounder, more restful sleep — which, in turn, could contribute to making better food choices. 

As always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which of this weeks Sunday six is your favourite? Is there something you want more, or less of? I'm open to any suggestions so please let me know! Just send a  tweet to @drkaranrajan and use the hashtag #theweeklydose at the end so I can find it!

Have a wonderful week, all.

Much love,

Karan