Some 'Save the Date's:
1. ASM Meeting, Boston, MAY 2014:
Speaker: Christen Rune Stensvold
Session Title: Passion for Parasites! Current Topics in Medical Parasitology
Session Date/Time: 5/18/2014 8:00:00 AM
Presentation Title: Blastocystis Clinical Relevance: More Common and Important than You Think
2. ICOPA, Mexico City, AUGUST 2014:
3. 1st International Blastocystis Symposium, Ankara, 28-29 MAY 2015:
Please go here for more information.
Just found out that out of 1065
Blastocystis papers in
PubMed, 269 are can be downloaded for free! If you enter '
Blastocystis'
in the search box, you'll see the 1065 or so hits, but if you go to the
right side bar, you have the option of having the Free Full Text (269)
display.
I have disabled
Google+ comments for now due to repetitive abuse.
However, it is still possible to comment on blog posts, only now
comments will be reviewed and potentially moderated by me prior to
publishing.
In case there should be readers who think that I'm trying to propagate the view that
Blastocystis
is pathogenic, I hope that after going through my blog posts
they will realise that I'm not; in fact, I'm much more trying to be the
devil's advocate:
Blastocystis is 'innocent' unless proven otherwise. In my opinion we have very little clinical evidence of pathogenicity. And at our lab, we generally do not recommend treating
patients with
Blastocystis. In fact, we really don't know HOW to treat
Blastocystis, - and maybe that's one of the most fundamental issues in
Blastocystis research.
I know that many treatment regimens are currently in use for
Blastocystis despite the absence of clinical guidelines, and some of them are used systematically at various
clinics it seems, but off the top of my head I cannot think of one
single randomised controlled treatment study that have explored the
microbiological and clinical effect of treatment. Such studies are critical to our understanding of the role of the parasite in health and disease,
although even this type of studies have limitations such as non-specific
drug actions that will blur our ability to point out
Blastocystis as
the culprit, and also some drugs may have adverse effects that mimic
symptoms potentially caused by
Blastocystis, including symptoms related
to intestinal dysbiosis. I hope that those who have extensive experience
with
Blastocystis treatment will soon take to sharing their knowledge.
But I guess that what we are currently trying in various fields is to get a differentiated view of
Blastocystis - for instance:
can colonisation turn into infection, and is there any such thing as a Blastocystis
infection at all? Can, and if so,
when does
Blastocystis carriage lead
to pathology/disease? Which are the interactions between
Blastocystis and the remaining microbiota? What host factors may be responsible for potential differences in
Blastocystis-mediated disease susceptibility?
Don't miss the February issue of 'This Month In
Blastocystis Research' which will be available in a week or so.
