Aquagenic palmar wrinkling

Again, I think we as a CF community are so fortunate to have Mandy and all of her amazing research around treatments for CF. I have learned so much from her and this post is another testament to her dedication to the lives of all CFers.

As many of you know, I have been drinking green smoothies in an attempt to get more greens in my diet - I truly eat like a crazy teenager, which I know is not good for my health. I really love the smoothies and they taste wonderful.

A benefit I didn't realize I could expect from these wonderful smoothies is my aquagenic palmar wrinkling has disappeared. It took about 4 weeks of drinking the smoothies everyday, but it worked!

Now what exactly the health consequences are of this, we aren't sure. But we do know that those with CF and those who are CFTR carriers wrinkle much faster when submerged in water.

I'll continue to keep you all posted on any other exciting changes!

MDRPA to MDSPA

In July 2011, I was so bummed to be admitted to the hospital with very, very few antibiotic options to treat my PA. Basically I had colistin and sorta kinda beta-lactams (intermediate resistance). Not too fun.

Well, thanks to the amazing wisdom of Ms. Mandy - who is always giving me great ideas), I have been taking Chilated Magnesium every day since October.

And in clinic on Jan 12, for the first time in 3 years, my clinic took me off isolation because I no longer have multi-drug resistant PA. Meaning all 3 of my PA strains are susceptible to nearly all classes of antibiotics (one strain is resistant to one class).

Talk about amazing. Incredible. Truly, a God-send.



Here are some studies supporting this outcome (thank you to Mandy's blog for these references):

Proteomic analysis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa grown under magnesium limitation.

Guina T, Wu M, Miller SI, Purvine SO, Yi EC, Eng J, Goodlett DR, Aebersold R, Ernst RK, Lee KA.

Department of Pediatrics, Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA. tguina@u.washington.edu 

In this study, large-scale qualitative and quantitative proteomic technology was applied to the analysis of the opportunistic bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa grown under magnesium limitation, an environmental condition previously shown to induce expression of various virulence factors. For quantitative analysis, whole cell and membrane proteins were differentially labeled with isotope-coded affinity tag (ICAT) reagents and ICAT reagent-labeled peptides were separated by two-dimensional chromatography prior to analysis by electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS) in an ion trap mass spectrometer (ITMS). To increase the number of protein identifications, gas-phase fractionation (GPF) in the m/z dimension was employed for analysis of ICAT peptides derived from whole cell extracts. The experiments confirmed expression of 1331 P. aeruginosa proteins of which 145 were differentially expressed upon limitation of magnesium. A number of conserved Gram-negative magnesium stress-response proteins involved in bacterial virulence were among the most abundant proteins induced in low magnesium. Comparative ICAT analysis of membrane versus whole cell protein indicated that growth of P. aeruginosa in low magnesium resulted in altered subcellular compartmentalization of large enzyme complexes such as ribosomes. This result was confirmed by 2-D PAGE analysis of P. aeruginosa outer membrane proteins. This study shows that large-scale quantitative proteomic technology can be successfully applied to the analysis of whole bacteria and to the discovery of functionally relevant biologic phenotypes. 

PMID: 12837596 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]