Battling the odds against pancreatic cancer

The fact that he’s battling pancreatic cancer long after most have succumbed to it barely enters Bob Maloney’s mind — until he does the most trivial, mundane tasks that will, in all likelihood, outlive him.

When he’s detaching the battery cables to their car in Queens, New York before heading to their condo in North Palm for the winter, he wonders, “Will Diane know how to do this if I’m not around in six months?”

Or will his wife of 22 years, Diane Curry, be left to figure out the task alone?

“I don’t think about any of that stuff,” she tells him, her eyes welling up. “I think about missing you.”

Maloney and Curry have had what few other with this disease have had: Time. Despite three surgeries, Maloney is alive nearly 3 and a half years since he was diagnosed. That number is an outlier for a disease that has the lowest survival rate of any cancer.

Three out of four people die within the first year of being diagnosed. A staggering 94 percent will not live past five.

Maloney, a retired New York firefighter, is battling in that treacherous middle ground.

“You live waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.

But if his example shows anything, he says, it’s hope. Hope for those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and their families. Hope that this disease will gain more attention — November was pancreatic cancer awareness month, though most people think of it only as diabetes awareness month. And the hope that has made breast cancer and prostate cancer survivable conditions.

Hope that personal stories like his — and those of actors Patrick Swayze and Michael Landon, who died of the disease — will bring attention and, more important, research dollars to this cause.

“You have to try to make the best of every day,” Maloney said.

Why has he lived this long? Mostly, doctors think, because he listened to his body.

When Maloney felt a consistent pain in his stomach and side in July of 2009 for more than a month, he went to see the doctor. Statistics say that men are reticent to acknowledge a medical condition and worse about following up with a doctor. But when Maloney went in for a sonogram check of his abdomen, doctors immediately saw the tumor on his pancreas.

“We knew almost nothing about it,” Maloney said, “except all these famous people who had died from it.”

That afternoon, he was meeting with an oncologist. And 10 days later, he was undergoing an 11-hour surgery to remove a cancerous mass on his pancreas.

They had caught it early.

In the years since, he has undergone two more surgeries to remove masses that spread to his liver. And he has withstood two rounds of chemotherapy that zapped him of his strength and his hair. He lost more than 25 pounds and sometimes felt on the edge of death itself.

But mostly, he withstood, enduring long enough to see a life many other pancreatic cancer patients do not.

In these 40 months, he has lived another lifetime: He watched their two daughters get married; his daughter Tara had twin babies and Maloney and Curry were at the hospital for the birth; they’ve traveled, despite his condition, to Spain, Vienna, and Prague.

And for the last three years, he has participated in the annual Lustgarten Foundation’s Pancreatic Cancer Research Walk in Jones Beach, New York, along with his wife and daughters.

“A lot of great things have happened since he was diagnosed,” Curry said. “I hope we look back in 10 or 15 years and laugh about how we tried to squeeze all these things in.”

More than living his own life, Maloney wants to help other pancreatic cancer victims live, as well. It is, after all, the fourth-deadliest cancer.

But funding is a major obstacle. Breast and prostate cancers not only have the highest survival rate past five years — 94 and 100 percent, respectively — they are also the best funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Pancreatic cancer, which has only a 6 percent survival rate, receives only about 2 percent of the research dollars. No early-detection tests have been developed for a disease whose symptoms (abdominal pain, loss of appetite, nausea, diabetes) can be overlooked.

Two of Maloney’s close friends — former fellow New York firefighters — died from the disease. One died within months, his cancer caught late — as are most cases of pancreatic cancer. The other, who was treated early, lived more than two years.

Maloney has seen that where there is research money, there is hope and life.

And he has shown, in his own example, how much one family can do with just a little more time.

“We’ve started to feel luck,” Diane Curry said. “And we want to do something to make a difference in the lives of other people.”

source: palmbeachpost.com

Women smokers who quit before 40 gain nine years in lifespan

PARIS - Women can add nine years to their lives by quitting smoking before the age of 40 but still face a 20-percent higher death rate than those who never smoked, a study said Saturday.

Published in The Lancet, a survey of nearly 1.2 million women in Britain showed that smoking throughout adulthood chopped on average 11 years off lifespan.

These results echoed the findings of earlier research conducted on men.

Among women who kicked the habit before the age of 40, the researchers measured an average lifespan gain of more than nine years compared with those who never stopped.

For those who quit before 30 the gains were even bigger -- about 10 years.

"Whether they are men or women, smokers who stop before reaching middle age will on average gain about an extra 10 years of life," study co-author Richard Peto of the University of Oxford said.

But the paper warned this did not mean that it was safe to continue smoking until 40 before quitting.

"Women who do so have throughout the next few decades [of their lives] a mortality rate 1.2 times that of never-smokers. This is a substantial excess risk, causing one in six of the deaths among these ex-smokers."

In Europe and the United States, the popularity of smoking reached its peak among women in the 1960s, decades later than for men.

The Lancet study is one of the most extensive probes into the impacts of smoking on this generation of women, the first likely to have smoked substantially throughout their adult lives.

The research is part of a vast survey that enrolled 1.2 million women in the UK between 1996 and 2001. The volunteers were asked to detail their smoking history, and were followed for an average of 12 years.

The women were on average 55 years old when they signed up. Twenty percent of them were smokers, 28 percent ex-smokers, while 52 percent had never smoked.

The researchers found that the group of women who continued smoking had three times the overall mortality rate of never-smokers.

While the risks increased with the amount smoked, "Even those smoking fewer than 10 cigarettes per day... had double the overall mortality rate than never-smokers," warned the study.

It also cautioned against so-called "light" cigarettes, smoked by most of the women in the study.

"Low-tar cigarettes are not low-risk cigarettes and... more than half of those who smoke them will eventually be killed by them," the authors warned.

The key causes of death among smokers were chronic lung disease, lung cancer, stroke and heart disease.

source: abs-cbnnews.com