Jan the Man!

Words cannot express the debt of gratitiude we owe this man. He is of course Dr Jan Waldenstrom, without whom the rare blood cancer from which I and thousands of others suffer would be known as lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma. Thanks to him it rejoices in the rather more splendid name of Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia or WM for short. The good doctor was a Swedish physician who was born just after the turn of the last century and almost saw it out, dying in 1996. He made the discovery that brought him into my sphere of reference as recently as 1944 when he described patients suffering from a disease characterised by "hyperviscosity syndrome" in which abnormal lymphocytes crowd out the bone marrow, leading to anemia and an enlarged liver and spleen. Research has come on only sporadically since then and there is still no cure for the condition, nor indeed a prescribed course of treatment. Because WM is so rare, not enough research has been done on it specifically. Instead, doctors tend to look at what works in closely related diseases such as Multiple Myeloma and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, and then try to use similar approaches on WM.

So if Jan Waldenstrom were around today do you think that he would be happy at this state of affairs? I doubt it very much, and it's a shame that the great man is not here to drive forward and provide a focus for the latest research work. Anyway....before this blog starts to sound too much like a medical textbook I shall wrap up this post by saying why not read Jan Waldenstrom's obituary here and adding that I thought that a blog that had his name at the top ought to feature his picture too. So there you are!