It always intrigues me what a good job the red wine marketing people have done.

They have really sold the idea that red wine is only booze that’s good for the heart.

Norman Kaplan of Framingham Heart Study fame always said it’s the alcohol not the red wine specifically. Now a study reported from Italy would seem to support that.

It showed a different alcoholic drink, beer, has the same benefit as red wine, and can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease by 31%.

Actually there have been other studies showing the benefits of different types of beer - and it’s noted malt has a lot of those healthy vitamins - especially B6 and B12, and antioxidant flavanoids.

Also in a study, reported by John Folts of the University of Wisconsin to the American Heart Association it was noted dark beer can have particular benefits - Guinness has substantially more anti-clotting activity than Heineken.

No wonder the Irish are so healthy - and maybe their procreativity is not the result of their Catholicism, if we are to believe another report in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that moderate drinking protects against impotence in the long term (it’s all to do with keeping the blood flowing to the relevant parts I guess).

But “moderate” is the operative word. We all know about “brewers droop” and how you can’t get a good stiffy when you’ve had a serious skinful.

And, get this, it can even make you cognite better.

A study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiol;ogy showed people who drank did better than people who didn’t in a series of test to assess intellectual ability.

Other studies, also reported in the AJE noted that alcohol consumption may have a beneficial cognitive function in women, but not necessarily in men - I’m sure that’s just because men were trying to hit on the women after a few drinks, and the women maintained their cool and disdain (and probably the study was done by a woman).

In another however, it showed women who drank moderately (2-4 drinks a day) showed superior performance to abstainers. But that men also had some benefit - but they had to drink 4-8 drinks a day.

What amazes me is the quantity. Here am I telling my patients a healthy amount is an average of one drink a day/seven drinks a week for women. And two drinks a day/fourteen drinks a week for a man.

That’s a little different from the up to 30 drinks a week that were correlated with improved intellectual ability in the first study. Or the second, with up to 8 drinks a day correlating with “superior performance in many cognitive domains”

I’d have expected someone drinking 56 drinks a week to be a driveling idiot. But let’s drink to that.

 If you were unkind, you could argue Ralph Steinmans’s cancer treatment isn’t so hot.

Ralph Steinman 

It was announced he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for medicine, but four days before it was awarded, he died of pancreatic cancer - despite using his own treatment (producing a quandary for the Nobel committee incidentally, as to whether he could still receive the prize).

His achievement was the discovery of Dendritic Cells - cells that recognize antigens, and present them up to the “Killer T Cells” of the immune system (you could be forgiven for thinking you were playing some violent video game) prompting them to turn on the cancer and destroy it - in some cases.

A Dendritic Cell

The action of the Dendritic cells is a bit like giving blood hounds the scent (others have likened Dendritic Cells to a “most wanted” poster - is it that doctors are really just seen as a form of law enforcement?).

Normaly the Dendritic Cells are only available in fairly small numbers in the body. But you can do the whole thing in vitro. Extract them in the blood, expose them to antigen derived from the cancer, rev up their reproduction with an immune cell stimulator, and inject them back into the patient - and Bob’s your uncle, they nail the cancer. Or that’s the idea.

At Stanford, other workers tried this technique on non-Hodgkin Lymphoma who had failed conventional therapy. In the first series of six patients, two had complete remission according to the Stanford website. Impressive.

Doing this all outside the body is not without it’s technical problems. The next goal is to find a way to enhance the number, and antigen recognition activities of Dendritic Cells in vivo.

This is all part of the utopian cancer vaccine dream.

Instead of the current way of loading the body with toxic chemicals (chemotherapy) that kills your body as well as the cancer (especially sensitive stuff like your bone marrow and your immune system), you produce a vaccine that has been “shown” your cancer so it will specifically target that.

Or more utopian still, produce a vaccine that will destroy all cancers - and eradicate this scourge, in the same way we have cured smallpox by vaccination?

Unlike Martin Luther King’s dream - which the Republican party’s response to having a black president has proved is not yet fulfilled (but excuse me, I’m getting off the point and political) - the cancer vaccine dream has been realized. At least to some extent.

Provenge is an example of this brave new world (though not without it’s problems - see post Can We Afford It?). This is a new treatment for prostate cancer that works in a similar way, stimulating the immune system to attack the cancer. And can perhaps be seen as part of Ralph Steinmann’s legacy.

“Ralph worked right up until last week,” according to Michel Nussenzweig, a collaborator of Steinman’s. “His dream was to use his discovery to cure cancer. . . . . It’s a dream that’s pretty close.”

The unkind take is to chastise him because his treatment didn’t save his own life (Steinman started a clinical trial at Rockefeller University in which he was the only patient). It may well have prolonged it though.

One should applaude him for winning a Noble prize and sympathize with his family. And also question if this is the price of being a Nobel laureate - see post The Success of Pancreatic Cancer

 This was the post I put on the blog that Mrs Gagg created for me when I retired so that I can keep in touch with all my old patients (in the immodest belief that, in their distress and bereavement, they might want to know what I’m doing). 

Today we (Paula and I) are cozily nestled against each other on a Virgin train (with small seats) under blue skies on our way to Edinburgh. Yesterday we were wasted and hung over on the top of a double decker bus behind a rain pelted windscreen, on our way back from the 40 year anniversary bash of the 1970 graduates from Guy’s Hospital medical school, that was held in Oxford (and was really the focal point for this trip to England). The Harry Potter style dinner