Tag: Uncategorized

I am going to Mount Everest Basecamp with the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (please donate). They have a program called Moving Mountains for Multiple Myeloma. These are even driven fund raisers. They put together a team of patients, doctors, patient caregivers, and people climbing in memorial for someone they lost to multiple myeloma.

The trek to Everest basecamp starts at 4,500 feet in Kathmandu and ends at 18,192 in Everest Basecamp. The trek isn’t until next march but this past week-end the trekking team got together to meet and do some high altitude climbing around Colorado. We went to the top of Mt Democrat at 14,178 feet. This is the highest I have ever hiked.

One of the goals was to treat this Colorado trip as a shakedown trip. Try out all of the gear we will actually use on the trek to make sure it works. One of the pieces that needed to be tried out was acetazolamide, or Diamox, to prevent acute mountain sickness. The team has a few myeloma doctors and a plastic surgeon, but I am the only nephrologist. One of the participants singled me out and asked an interesting question. This trekker is on spironolactone for hypertension, and wanted to know if it was safe to combine spironolactone with acetazolamide. This made the hair on my neck stand up. Both drugs cause metabolic acidosis so that doesn’t seem like a good thing. Both drugs have an opposite effect on renal potassium handling, acetazolamide causes potassium wasting, spironolactone causes potassium retention. And lastly, one of the down sides of a diuretic during mountain trekking is preventing hypovolemia, as both insensible and sensible water losses are increased with activity and getting, purifying, and carrying enough water is a constant concern on these trips. All of this made me feel that spironolactone and aldactone were a bad combination.

I asked Twitter for their thoughts and as usual they did not disappoint:

Everest, Spironolactone, and Acetazolamide

The article the Edgar found was particularly interesting.

The article is worth a read. I made a visual abstract. It seems that spironolactone does not provide protection and may make people more susceptible to mild, acute mountain sickness.

He is a 57 year old man. Husband. Father. A bit over weight, nothing too extreme. He likes to play basketball. He drinks bourbon, an occasional scotch; he rarely over indulges. The more I learn about him, the more familiar he is. He looks like any one of my friends. He only found his way to my office after his family practice doctor got frustrated trying to control his blood pressure. Maybe it’s sleep apnea or too much salt in the diet. Sometimes I find a rare salt-retaining hormone abnormality.

On the first visit I did a routine urinalysis. It showed a hint of protein. When he came back, delighted with his improved blood pressures, I delved a little deeper and discovered the hint of protein was a lot more significant, with a strange ratio of albumin to protein. This is the pattern we see in myeloma. All of a sudden, the hemoglobin that looked like routine anemia yesterday is now the car crash I can’t turn away from. The arthritis he mentioned transforms in my mind into myeloma bone pain. 

I tell him what I’m thinking and the casual, good natured clinical encounters become heavier. I order the myeloma tests I learned about in medical school, the PEP brothers, SPEP and UPEP. I add on the plasma free light chains that the myeloma specialists perseverate on. 

A few days later I see the electronics flag indicating unviewed lab results.
Like Schrödinger’s cat in the box, at that moment he has myeloma and doesn’t have myeloma. 

Time for the ambiguity to end. Time to open up the box and look inside…

This bit of medical fiction was me trying to express why I’m raising money for multiple myeloma.

I am raising money for the Multiple Myeloma Foundation as part of their Moving Mountains for Myeloma program. The peak of this endeavor will be a trip to Mount Everest Basecamp. My role is to bring awareness of myeloma, I hope this helps give an impression of one small aspect of this devastating but increasingly treatable disease. Help myeloma research.

For years one of the fronts that social media advocates battled was the freedom to tweet at meetings. A number of meetings (we are looking at you ATC) were less than welcoming. I suspect many conferences were used to selling access to the meeting to people who did not participate through video tape, audio recordings or other means and they saw the social media coverage as unnecessary competition.

Why let bloggers and social media gadfly provide for free what we can sell.

Conferences are also typically run by people not on social media and who are unfamiliar with the norms of those communities. Organizers paraded excuses of academic purity and protecting authors. The issues are well documented here.

This all bubbled over last week at the American Diabetes Association national meeting in San Diego (#2017ADA). The organizers tried to enforce a no pictures policy:

One take down notice, lead to another, lead to another and suddenly the @AmDiabetesAssn feed was nothing but take down notices:

Linda Cann, the association’s senior vice president, was quoted by Liz Neporent, ” The association will be reevaluating the policy after the meeting is over”

I went through the PBFluids back catalog to find three posts on the dangers of running marathons. Two on hyponatremia and one on coronary calcium. Enjoy. Hope to see you on the Twitter with hashtag #NephJC on May 23, at 9pm EST, and May 24, at 8pm GMT.

I had the honor of speaking at the Michigan State Medical Society last night. I gave an update on nephrology.

The talk covered 6 subjects:

1. Contrast Nephropathy
2. NSAIDs and CKD
3. Timing of dialysis in AKI
4. PPIs and CKD
5. Empagliflozen
6. Sodium intake and excretion

5. Epagliflozen

Update in Nephrology: Empagliflozen from joel topf on Vimeo.

6. I don’t have a video for the sodium story. It’s only a few slides, not worth recording a video.

The Keynote file is available here.

101 MB