0 Video: The mystery of chronic pain

In this video from TED, Elliot Krane works with children in helping them with neuropathic pain and complex regional pain syndromes - nerve-related pain that continues from an injury long after the original accident occurred.

He practices at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, and here is one story of how he helped a young girl stop the tremendous pain that made even a feather-light touch on her arm agonizing.

This may or may not relate to those who suffer from persisting symptoms of Lyme disease - either way, this story is something worth watching and considering in our challenges to understand and stop pain.

You might also want to read the comments on the original page for this video - the information found there may help you or someone else you love in tracking down another or an additional cause for pain:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elliot_krane_the_mystery_of_chronic_pain.html

[Time 08:14]

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3 Mullis' PCR and Borrelia burgdoferi's discovery

Remember I got a pile of books on loan to read? And remember that eccentric Nobel prize winner, Kary Mullis, who was featured in a TED video I posted?

According to Bull's Eye: Unraveling the Medical Mystery of Lyme Disease, Kary's new invention, developed in 1983 - Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) - was instrumental in learning more about Borrelia burgdorferi's history:

"One medical researcher who was quick to apply this technique in the medical arena was Dr. David Persing, then at the Yale University Department of Pathology. Being at Yale, Persing was interested in Lyme disease. Among many other projects, he and colleagues used PCR on 102 dried-out or alcohol-preserved tick specimens from the Museum in Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachussetts. The ticks had been collected from various areas in New England between 1945 and 1951; each was tagged with the exact location where they had been collected. The researchers also examined another batch of ticks from the Smithsonian collection in Washington, D.C., some dating back as far as 1924. They found ticks that were positive for the DNA of B. burgdorferi from Montauk Point and from the adjacent Heather Hills State Park from the mid-1940s. 

Several years later, the same group with additional colleagues reported the results of similar experiments done on tiny biopsy specimens taken from the ears of archived mice from the same museum. They found two specimens that tested positive by PCR anaylsis for B. burgdorferi from mice orginally captured near Dennis, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), in 1894! The DNA from these specimens was identical to the B31 strain that Willy Burgdorfer had found on Shelter Island. 

European investigators have reproduced these experiments using archived ticks from various parts of Europe including England and have found borrelial DNA dating back to the late 1880s as well. If the Lyme spirochete had been around for so long, why did it begin to surface as a recognized medical entity only in the past few decades? This question can be answered in one word --- deer."

I always find history fascinating, especially the connections between technology and information gathering. Here the PCR was invented around shortly after the time that news that Borrelia burgdorferi was the agent of Lyme disease was published in Science in 1982. We know far more about Bb now than we would have if this (or a similar technology) had not been developed at the time it was.

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17 Video: How bacteria "talk" and how to make them shut up

Another interesting TED talk today.

This one is by Bonnie Bassler, who discovered how cell populations use chemical powwows to stage attacks, evade immune systems and forge slimy defenses called biofilms. For that, she won a MacArthur "genius" grant.

At the beginning of Bassler's slideshow, she displays Lyme Disease as one of the bacteria we are in a war against, and she proceeds to explain how bacteria communicate with one another to invade us.

Once bacteria reach a certain population level after dividing, they release a chemical message that triggers their virulence. This communication is known as "quorum sensing" and many bacteria do it.

There is also another bacterial communication method known as "efficiency sensing" which is not mentioned here, but worth investigating.

I highly recommend taking 18 minutes out of your day to watch this video, and think about the implications of her research for Lyme Disease patients - as well as for anyone needing to treat bacterial infections in the future.



Additional Resources:
Bonnie Bassler's Homepage: http://www.molbio.princeton.edu/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=27

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