AppId is over the quota
Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously kept quiet about his illness and while a rare form of pancreatic cancer was at the root of his struggles, the company’s announcement of his death yesterday didn?t include information about the precise cause.
But if you ever question what someone can accomplish after being diagnosed with cancer, consider this. In the seven years since Jobs underwent surgery to remove what doctors call a neuroendocrine pancreatic tumor and — except for one medical leave — remained at the helm of Apple, the company:
Broadened the product line of the ubiquitous iPodIntroduced the MacBook Air laptopCreated an online retail phenomenon with the opening of its app storeTransformed the personal digital technology landscape with the introduction of the both the iPhone and the iPadThe high-tech visionary clearly never embraced a role as a cancer survivor and whether he’ll ever be seen as an inspiration in that regard remains to be seen. But his illness has focused attention on a tumor with widely varying prognosis about which little is known.
“We all call these neuroendocrine tumors,? Michaela Banck, a pancreatic cancer expert at the Mayo Clinic, tells the Health Blog. But ?if you have 50 patients, you have 50 different tumors with 50 different prognoses.? As the name implies, the tumors can affect levels of insulin and other hormones produced by the pancreas, but Banck says more research is needed to better understand how the cancer’s impact on hormones affects prognosis.
The encouraging news is that while the much more common form of pancreatic cancer, affecting 95% of cases, is especially fast moving and lethal, neuroendocrine tumors are often slow-growing and can be effectively treated with surgery — even cured in some cases if caught early enough. (As the WSJ reports today, Jobs’s disease ran a fairly predictable course.)
Two drugs — Afinitor from Novartis and Sutent from Pfizer — were approved for neuroendocrine pancreatic tumors early this year. No information is available on whether Jobs was treated with the drugs.
Jobs also had a liver transplant in 2009, though its connection to the cancer wasn’t disclosed. One worry about the role of transplants for cancer patients is that drugs used to prevent rejection of the organ depress the immune system, potentially opening the door for the cancer to return.
Interestingly, Afinitor is a member of a class of drugs originally developed to prevent organ rejection.
Mayo’s Banck is hopeful that the explosion information about cancer in general from genetic analysis of tumors will soon unlock some of the mysteries of the disease that struck Jobs.
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