Radiation exposure: my teeth are terrible, so I've had a lot of dental X-rays. Could have something to do with it — X-rays aren't high-level exposure, but there's no safe level of radiation (ask Gabrielle). Benzene: we're talking working at a gasoline refinery, not inhaling fumes while filling up your tank. Cigarette smoking: I smoked for 4 years, off and on, but I quit when I was 21 and never smoked again. Pesticides, dioxins, other chemicals most people probably don't encounter at home or in desk jobs. That's about it. Electro-magnetic fields, for example living under a high-voltage power line: evidence suggestive, but inconclusive (and I've never lived under a power line). Some people think even home electric current, and devices, can be a risk factor, but if that were true we'd have an epidemic on our hands.
How about vices? Start with coffee, to which I've been happily addicted most of my adult life. I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, many of whose citizens consider coffee just shy of heroin on the scale of consumable evil. So did I, for a few years.But if you think coffee's bad for you, think again. Cruising PubMed brings some astonishing results. In the last ten years, coffee's been found to reduce, rather substantially, your risk of many kinds of cancers: colon, liver, pancreas, kidney, stomach. It also reduces your risk of Parkinson's disease, cognitive decline in old age, possibly Alzheimer's. It can even lower some coronary risk factors (e.g. cholesterol), though it does raise inflammation levels, which may be a risk factor. (All this is at moderate consumption levels, up to 300-400 mg caffeine/day. That's 3-4 American diner coffees, 4-5 espressos, 1-2 large Starbucks-type drip coffees. Above that, watch out.) The caffeine itself isn't the principal active agent in this risk reduction; it's other chemicals, so decaf might be just as good for you.
Coffee tends to be a health negative mainly in countries where people boil coffee, such as Sweden and Greece (but what would you expect? Boiled coffee's terrible.) If you don't believe me, just go to PubMed and enter "coffee cancer" or "coffee cardiovascular" in the search bar. Obviously if coffee's making you jittery, tense, or murderous, you probably shouldn't drink it, but not because it'll hurt you physically.
Alcohol? Same thing. Most recent research points to general benefits from drinking up to two glasses a day, not just of wine but of any kind of alcohol. It lowers
coronary risk, colon cancer risk. Typically it's a J-shaped curve: non-drinkers on the left, risk dropping with 1-2 glasses/day of alcohol, then rising steeply into a danger zone with heavy drinking. The resveratrol in red wine specifically attacks leukemia cells (not necessarily the kind I have, but those are little studied). A couple of case-control studies of adult-onset leukemia showed that moderate levels of beer and liquor consumption exerted a considerable protective effect.Those studies concluded that moderate red wine consumption somewhat increased risk (~1.5-2x). However, the evidence is imperfect (not controlled, e.g., for dietary differences), and the biggest study by far (649 leukemia patients) took place in Italy. Different lifestyle, eating habits, gene pool, medical tradition, everything. Hmmm.
Those studies addressed the most common types of leukemia: acute and chronic myeloid, acute and chronic lymphocytic. As for hairy cell, it's hard to find enough people with a rare disease to get a statistically significant result. I couldn't discover much in the literature. A 1985 case-control study — based on 45 HCL patients — concluded:
There was no association found for cigarette smoking, alcohol or coffee consumption and hairy cell leukemia. With respect to occupational risk factors... reported exposure to organic chemicals in the workplace was significantly greater among both sexes of the cases than among their respective matched controls (relative risk (RR) = 3.10). Other variables found to be significantly associated with hairy cell leukemia were farm birthplace (RR = 4.20), anemia (RR = 4.29), migraine (RR = 4.80), infectious mononucleosis (RR = 9.00), and routine use of aspirin (RR = 3.41).
None of this looks like me. No significant chemical exposure that I know of. Never had mono, migraine, or anemia; wasn't born on a farm; don't use aspirin. The only other HCL-specific risk factor I could locate in the literature was benzene, in Japanese workers.
So the answer to why, for me, will always remain nobody knows. No reason. It just happened.
Today's pattern was like yesterday: felt OK in the morning, took a long walk, wiped out by 1 PM. Slept most of the afternoon, this time a sleep so heavy it felt like I was lying under an elephant. OK through dinner, then crashed again. Just 2 more days to get through.
3 comments:
(JKH) With respect to electromagnetic exposure, the recent ubiquitous use of wireless networking and the proximity with which people hold their laptops would cause an increase in cases and possibly reduce the average age of the patient. Bear in mind that EM flux reduces as 1/R^2, so power line exposure wouldn't be nearly as common as if someone place a Wireless-G transmitter in their lap for hours on end. Also, the higher frequency of Wireless-G devices may have a bigger impact than low frequency power lines.
(J. Howard) With respect to EM exposure, the recent ubiquitous use of laptops may cause an increase in incidence and a decrease in average age of patient if there is a cause/effect relationship. Since EM flux dissipates as 1/R^2, holding a "low-power" WG transmitter in your lap may be far more harmful than living near a "high-power" 60 Hz line.
Also, the higher frequency of Wireless-G devices may have more of an effect.
Jon Howard's comment is worth pondering, but to my knowledge few studies of electromagnetic exposure in the frequency ranges of most consumer devices have shown serious effects.
A very large Danish study (420,000 people followed for 20 years) published in 2001 found no link between cellphones (held close to the head) and cancer. Cellphones operate in megahertz frequency ranges.
Wireless G uses the 2.4Ghz band, same as many cordless phones. This is within the microwave range, but near the bottom end. At sufficiently high wattages (hundreds of watts), microwaves can heat tissues (that's how your microwave oven works). But no good evidence suggests that they can damage cells in other ways. Putting a laptop with wireless G on your lap gives about the same exposure as a mobile phone, so the risk of tissue damage from heating is basically nil.
Many studies of relationships between nonionizing radiation (such as these various sources) and leukemia and other cancers have been conducted over several decades. Almost all of them find no link, and the rest are inconclusive. A few suggestive cancer clusters have been found, but cancer clusters sometimes occur randomly. Numerous speculations exist on ways that magnetic fields might affect cells (other than destroying them by heating or ionization). Still, no large peer-reviewed studies have found a clear causal link between health problems and magnetic fields or radiation from cellphones or wireless transmitters.
However, it's too soon to dismiss the speculations. Jon's right that you should probably limit the amount of time you sit around with a laptop on your lap, but I would worry too much about this.
Check the Wikipedia entries on "non-ionizing radiation" and "mobile phones and health" as a starting point for further research.
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