by If you suffer from allergies, like I do, you should be blessing your sneezing and snotting and not sneering at your symptoms because, those allergic reactions may well be an indicator that you probably don’t have brain cancer.
Here is the amazing scientific study:
There may be one benefit to having a lot of allergies — they may protect against glioma, researchers found.
Patients with gliomas were significantly less likely to report having any allergy (OR 0.60, 95% CI 0.46 to 0.79), a relationship that applied to both high- and low-grade tumors, Bridget McCarthy, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and colleagues reported in the February issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
In fact, patients who had more types of allergies — seasonal, medication, pet, food, and other — had even lower odds of glioma, with an 11% reduction for those with allergies in one category and a 64% reduction for those with allergies in four or more categories (P<0.05 for trend).
That sort of deep research is incredible because it gives new hope to those who suffer from allergies — that their symptoms might really be a blessing — and it also warns those without allergies to get checked for brain cancer just to make sure their immunity is real, and not a hidden, internal, threat stewing in their brain.
We understand this allergy/glioma research may not be entirely determinative, but the loose correlation between allergies and brain tumors certainly deserves deeper research.
We already know high cholesterol is a behavioral problem, and not solely one of genetics, and the same, parallel, argument can be made that high blood pressure is a behavioral disease that we tend to treat only with medication.
If you lose weight, eat right, remove salt and caffeine from your diet, walk and practice deep breathing techniques, your blood pressure will most certainly go lower. Yes, that corrective behavioral list might be seen as “punishing” to some, but if you think about it — all those things are actually a gift you can actively give yourself every single day as you control your bad behavior and let your body begin to heal itself.
David,
Great article! It’s too true that people tend to think of the preventive measure as bad — but the thing they’re preventing is even worse!
That’s a really good point, Gordon. Preventative medicine has a really important role in American healthcare, and too few people take advantage of “being ahead of the death curve” when it comes to taking care of inevitable, future, health problems.