We had Kim's cold-blooded creatures come to our house for a birthday party. Lots of fun.
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Sunday, November 10, 2013
Slow-growing Charlotte’s Web yields marijuana designed for kids
Slow-growing Charlotte’s Web yields marijuana designed for kids
Low in THC, the compound that gives users a high, this specialized plant is in high demand.
By Kirsten Stewart
| The Salt Lake Tribune
COLORADO SPRINGS • Preparing Charlotte’s Web is a protracted, tedious process that starts at "the grow," two massive greenhouses on 56 acres of spring-fed land at an undisclosed location in the mountains.
It’s harvest time and the greenhouses are full of towering plants.
Colorado’s sunny climate allows the nonprofit Realm of Caring Foundation to grow marijuana year-round. It gets two harvests a year, but hopes to ramp up production to three to four harvests through a light deprivation strategy that causes the plants to flower in winter.
About a third of each greenhouse is devoted to Charlotte’s Web, a shorter, squattier plant that grows more slowly than other varieties. The plant is high in cannabidiol (CBD) but low in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the component of marijuana that creates a high in users.
It’s in such high demand by parents of ill children, typically kids with epilepsy, that Realm can’t immediately supply them all.
"It keeps cutting into our THC growing, which has been necessary to move families off the waiting list," said 34-year-old Joel Stanley, one of six brothers running the foundation. "But we are walking a fine line" financially, he said, because Charlotte’s Web is sold almost at cost.
It takes 13 to 14 workers to tend the plants. Dogs roam the property, which is fenced and under 24-hour camera surveillance.
After the plants are harvested, they are hung to dry and cured like tobacco. They are trimmed, weighed and vacuum sealed into food-grade bags for shipment to dispensaries.
Everything is labeled and carefully inventoried, and every part of the plant is used, including the stems as fertilizer.
Charlotte’s Web is sent to Realm’s lab, an industrial kitchen in Denver overseen by 32-year-old Jesse Stanley.
Buds and leaves are stripped from the stems and soaked for hours in grain alcohol to extract the cannabinoids, Jesse Stanley explained. The resulting dark amber-colored liquid is strained through a fine mesh to remove all plant material and poured into a rotary evaporator to remove the alcohol.
A device used in chemical laboratories, the "rotovap" allows for liquid solvents — in this case, a CBD extract — to be quickly and gently removed without excessive heating. The end product is a gummy substance thicker than pancake syrup.
"We can do about a liter-and-a-half an hour," said Bryson Rast, a lab technician the Stanley brothers hired away from the pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement industries.
The brothers also just acquired a high-performance liquid chromatography machine, which they’ll use to validate samples, or measure the amount of CBD and THC in each batch. Currently samples are sent out for testing, which is expensive, said Jesse Stanley.
When the samples return, he dilutes them with olive oil.
"It’s primitive the way we do things, but accurate," he said. "Quality control is our goal."
Colorado Springs physician Margaret Gedde who is tracking children who are using Charlotte’s Web, said there are other growers that sell low-THC products.
"But so far nobody has stepped up like the Realm of Caring has to provide this to kids and do it in a way that is safe," said Gedde. "They grow it safely and test the batches so we know the actual milligrams and it can be accurately dosed."
Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Speaking a second language delays dementias, even in the illiterate, study finds
Speaking a second language delays dementias, even in the illiterate, study finds
Nov. 6, 2013 at 4:00 PM ET
DAVID DUPREY / AP file
Speaking more than one language may ward off three types of dementia, including the Alzheimer's disease that affected this human brain on display at the Musuem of Neuroanatomy at the University at Buffalo, in Buffalo, N.Y.
There’s more evidence that speaking a second language can delay the onset of dementia later in life — this time in a population where even illiterate people reaped the benefits of being bilingual.
Conducted in Hyderabad, India, the largest study of its kind so far found that speaking two languages slowed the start of three types of dementia — including Alzheimer’s disease — by an average of 4.5 years.
“Being bilingual is a particularly efficient and effective type of mental training,” said Dr. Thomas H. Bak, a researcher at The University of Edinburgh and a co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. “In a way, I have to selectively activate one language and deactivate the other language. This switching really requires attention.”
That kind of attention keeps the brain nimble and may ward off not only Alzheimer’s disease, but other cognitive conditions such as frontotemporal dementia and vascular dementia, the new study found.
Bak is part of the team led by Dr. Suvarna Alladi, a professor of neurology at the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad. The researchers examined case records of 648 patients with dementia who entered a memory clinic at a Hyderabad university hospital between June 2006 and October 2012.
Slightly more than half of the patients, some 391, spoke more than one language in a place where many people grow up learning three or more languages, including Telugu and Dakkhini along with English and Hindi.
Previous studies have focused on the impact of bilingualism on dementia mostly in immigrants in Canada, which may have influenced the results, Bak said.
“It really brought up the question, is it the bilingualism or is it is being an immigrant?” he said. “They have very different lifestyles, very different diets, which can affect the outcome.”
Still, those studies also found that speaking more than one language delayed dementia by the same span of time, four to five years.
The Indian patients offered a chance to examine the issue in a society where many people are naturally multilingual and shift easily among different languages in different social settings.
“If I live in Hyderabad, I am practically always switching,” said Bak. “There will not be a day when I don’t have a chance to practice.”
The researchers found that patients who spoke a single language developed the first symptoms of dementia at age 61, versus age 65 ½ in those who were bilingual. The delay was slightly more than three years for Alzheimer’s disease, but about six years for frontotemporal dementia and about 3.7 years for vascular dementia.
In people who couldn’t read, the delay of dementia was about six years later in those who were bilingual versus those who spoke only one language — evidence that education isn’t the key in postponing problems, the researchers said.
The effect of bilingualism on dementia onset was independent of other factors including education, gender, occupation and whether patients lived in urban or rural areas, the authors said.
Speaking more than two languages didn’t appear to increase the effect, a result that surprised researchers, Bak said. Other studies have found that the more languages spoken, the greater the protection against dementia.
An outside expert who documented the first physical effects of the delay of dementia in people who speak more than one language praised the new study.
“Being able to show that immigrant status was not a factor answers one remaining question, said Dr. Tom Schweizer, a neuroscientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, who found in 2011 that bilingual people have twice as much brain damage as those who speak one language before they show signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
“The fact that the illiterate subjects were also showing this strong effect was also novel,” he added.
It’s still not clear exactly how language acquisition triggers protection against dementia, or whether another kind of intense brain activity such as learning an instrument or doing puzzles could mimic the effect, Schweizer said.
Going forward, conducting dementia research in other non-Western cultures will be key to understanding the effect of bilingualism on dementia, the authors of the new study said.
“For me, the most important message is that you cannot do all the studies in the same place,”Bak said. “In completely different contexts, in complete different populations, we found the same effect.”
JoNel Aleccia is a senior health reporter with NBC News. Follow her on Twitter at @JoNel_Aleccia or send her an email.
Cells offer hope for Type 1 diabetes
Editor's note: November is National Diabetes Month. Nearly 26 million Americans have diabetes, and another 79 million are at risk of developing the disease. To learn more, visit Diabetes.org.
(CNN) -- The e-mail ended with a question that belied the author's pain: "It's a small world, isn't it?"
Michael Schofield read the message from Elizabeth Baptiste again. Baptiste worked at AT&T, just like him. She had three sons, like him. And her youngest, Michael, was the donor who had changed his life.
"It sent shivers down my body, you know, because you don't expect..."
Schofield's voice, with its lingering Liverpool accent, trails off.
Schofield, 53, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1982. People who have Type 1 diabetes do not produce insulin, a hormone the body needs to convert sugar and starches into energy. Their white blood cells attack and destroy the cells that produce insulin in the pancreas.
Like most Type 1 diabetics, Schofield learned to control his diabetes with insulin injections and constant monitoring. But he still experienced hypoglycemic attacks when his blood sugar levels got too low. It was like being in a fog -- one he couldn't escape until someone helped him. If it went on too long, he would lose consciousness.
As he got older, Schofield's body adapted to the extreme lows; so when his blood sugar levels dropped below normal, he didn't experience the typical symptoms. In other words, he didn't know he was in danger until he passed out.
"Over time, your body just starts to break down," he says. "They say (diabetes) is a slow killer, and it is."
Tiny cells offer hope
Pancreas transplants for patients such as Schofield are not typically an option because they are difficult to perform, said Dr. Michael Rickels, associate professor of medicine at University of Pennsylvania. But an experimental procedure using the pancreas' islet cells is being tested at medical centers around the country. If it's approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it could make a difference for patients who are no longer able to successfully manage their diabetes.
Islet cells contain beta cells that produce insulin, as well as alpha cells that produce a hormone called glucagon. Both are used to regulate the body's glucose, or sugar, levels. In the 1990s, scientists in Alberta, Canada, figured out how to isolate these islets from a deceased donor's pancreas and transplant them into the liver of a diabetic patient. The procedure was dubbed the "Edmonton Protocol."
Since then, researchers have been trying to improve the survival rate of the cells during transplantation. Most patients who undergo the procedure now need two infusions of islet cells to maintain normal glucose levels long-term.
Rickels and his colleagues recently published a study in the journal Diabetes detailing a new protocol, which gives the extracted islets three days to "rest" before they're transferred to the living recipient. All of the patients in Rickels' study were able to come off insulin therapy for at least a year after a single transplant.
Data from patients in other countries where the procedure has already been approved shows some patients can stop using insulin for anywhere from five to 10 years, Rickels said.
Schofield had been following the islet cell research since the 1990s. One Saturday morning, after a particularly bad hypoglycemic attack, he decided to fill out a survey to see whether he qualified for a trial funded by the National Institutes of Health. Two days later, he received a message from the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco.
Schofield flew from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, to California to learn more about the transplant.
Dr. Andrew Posselt, director of the Pancreatic Islet Cell Transplant Program at UCSF, told Schofield that the procedure would take less than two hours and he would be home within two or three days. He would, however, have to remain on immunosuppressant drugs the rest of his life. The drugs prevent the patient's white blood cells from attacking the new islet cells, Posselt explained.
The next year was filled with medical tests. Schofield didn't receive a donor pancreas in time to participate in the government trial. But he discovered his employer health insurance would pay for the experimental transplant. His doctors helped him submit a request to the FDA to get the private procedure approved.
Now all he needed was a donor.
A life cut short
Michael Baptiste was a good kid, his mom, Elizabeth, says. "Growing up, he was my pain in the butt," she remembers with a laugh. "He was my third child. He was the one who gave me the headaches."
He was also a giving person. When his mom took him to the DMV to get his driver's license, he checked the organ donor box without hesitation.
At 23, he was taking responsibility for his life and his family. He was going to school to become an electrician. He worked nights at Home Depot to provide for his 5-year-old daughter, Angelina. He took his mom to Disneyland.
"He was moving up," Elizabeth Baptiste says. "And it was cut short."
On March 25, 2012, Michael Baptiste was goofing off with friends in a restaurant parking lot. He fell out of a car while the driver was doing donuts, and he hit his head. Doctors kept him alive for six days before pronouncing him brain dead.
A few days later Schofield, received his first infusion of islet cells. Two weeks later, he was off insulin. He looked down at his glucose monitor one day and saw a flat line for the first time in 30 years.
"That was euphoria," he says. He still wears his monitor to this day, enjoying the high looking at the flat line gives him.
Schofield sent a note to his anonymous donor's family, thanking them for giving him a second chance at life. He then began speaking publicly about his transplant, urging the FDA to approve the procedure for others in the United States.
"People need to be aware that this is an effective alternative treatment," Posselt said. "Funding is very difficult to get for this kind of procedure in the U.S.; as a result, we're falling behind other countries."
Two human clinical trials are underway in the United States. Once both are completed, researchers will submit the data to the FDA for review. Rickels hopes in the next two to three years, all his and his colleagues' hard work will pay off.
Only about 5% of people with diabetes have Type 1, according to the American Diabetes Association. Islet cell transplantation cannot help those with Type 2 diabetes, Posselt said, because they already produce insulin -- their bodies just have a greater resistance to the hormone.
"I think that this procedure can definitely benefit some diabetics, but I don't think it's the panacea for every diabetic," he said.
Saying thank you
On June 1, Schofield met Elizabeth Baptiste at Pier 39 in San Francisco. She wore a Donald Duck T-shirt to represent her son's favorite Disney character. When she saw Schofield, she waved her hand high in the air and had a flashback to the days when she used to do the same for Michael when he ran off in a crowd.
The meeting was a mix of emotions for Schofield.
"It's a happy moment that I got the transplant, got to meet her, say thank you," Schofield remembers. "It's a sad moment because having three children of my own, I can't imagine the pain."
But for Baptiste, it was therapeutic. She hasn't heard from any of her son's other recipients.
"I've told people, 'I know my son is dead,' " she says. "But I know other people have his parts, so I know he's still alive. Michael came to me at the right time. ... I needed a hug from my son, and that's what he was there for."
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