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Steve Jobs Reportedly Under the Knife at Stanford Hospital Today
New York, 6:40 PM
Fri Nov 27
13 posts in the last 24 hours
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Steve Jobs Reportedly Under the Knife at Stanford Hospital Today |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
01/28/09
Nonetheless, the cat's out of the bag now.
I do wish Mr. Jobs the best -- he is clearly very ill from all reports.
01/27/09
When people are talking about how deadly pancreatic cancer is, they are almost invariably talking about pancreatic *adenocarcinoma*, which is a malignancy of the secretory parts of the pancreas ie. the ducts and glands. What Steve Jobs had (to the best of my knowledge, as I haven't seen an actual pathology report to confirm this) is an *islet cell* tumor, aka a neuroendocrine tumor. Islet cell tumors are *much* more indolent than pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Some neuroendocrine tumors can be aggressive, and predicting their long-term behavior is tricky, but on the whole they are better behaved tumors than adenocarcinoma.
Islet cell tumors can produce hormones themselves. A patient with an insulinoma can have abnormally high levels of insulin and very low blood sugar for example. Other Islet cell tumors don't produce any hormones at all.
So what could Steve have? Who knows, as we don't have enough info. Most likely, he is simply having problems with pancreatic insufficiency due to loss of the head of his pancreas with his Whipple's procedure. Perhaps he's having problems with scarring / adhesions in the region of the pancreas and small bowel, which would be a common post-surgical complication. Perhaps a lesion was noted on CT, for which he was admitted for surgical excision and pathologic examination.
He could have a recurrence of tumor (note I say "tumor" rather than "carcinoma" to emphasize the different behavior of these neoplasms from typical pancreatic adenocarcinoma). If he has metastatic islet cell tumor, it could account for weight loss, but there are a LOT of other reasons for a person who has lost a part of his pancreas to have nutrition problems. The press releases simply don't give enough information to draw a conclusion.
01/28/09
01/26/09
01/26/09
Awesome.
01/26/09
And even that post said it was still a part of the job.
01/26/09
Better call the X-files crew!
01/26/09
01/26/09
Oh and Stanford, if you kill the Jobs, you sleep with the fishes.
01/26/09
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01/26/09
01/26/09
01/26/09
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01/26/09
01/26/09
Obviously this has happened.
01/26/09
01/26/09
01/26/09
01/26/09
01/26/09
Only bloggers care to continue to beat the stupid cancer story to death, especially when a very KNOWN complication from his previous cancer scare explains everything he's going through to a T.
01/26/09
01/26/09
What they did was removed a portion of his Pancreas. An unfortunately aspect of this treatment is that while for his form of cancer it completely cures it, it can also caue a eventual organ failure 2-5 years after the fact at which point his whole pancreas will need to be removed and his food intake regulated due to lack of insulin now in his system as well as periodic hormone treatments due to the lack of other needed hormones, all produced by the pancreas.
Also due to the pancreas aiding in digestion your body ends up not getting much needed nutrients and goes into a deficiency which will cause massive weight loss, headaches, muscle aches, and tiredness.
So yes he doesnt have cancer, as the signs of what he has is CLEARLY being shown to anyone who even REMOTELY looks at what his previous cancer treatment would have been and then looks at the complications this can cause.
01/26/09
Except he WASNT diagnosed with a fatal form of pancreatic cancer. Unless, and this is a VERY slim unless his doctor complelely screwed up, he should have been fine.
Dude. My mom and my maternal grandmother both died of pancreas cancer. I participate in a familial study (as do my siblings) at Sloan Kettering, an a gene isolation study at Johns Hopkins.
There is NO - i repeat NO - pancreas cancer that is NOT fatal. Pancreas cancer is extremely aggressive, and is not fatal only in the rarest of cases. 75% of all those diagnosed die within a year of diagnosis. I know one guy who died 3 weeks after he was diagnosed. My mom got a year and a half. She was 59.
You can pretend all you want that Jobs doesn't have cancer. I wish it were so, as we could learn no much from him and his survival. But the chances are very slim, and my guess is that the cancer has shown up either on the bile duct or the liver, and the "hormone imbalance" is insulin related. Then again, I suspect his "hormone imbalance" is akin to Oprah's "thyroid problem". Meaning it is a smoke screen.
Trust me, if you ever get a choice about what kind of cancer to get, don't pick pancreas. As a disease, it is underfunded and under studied. We have no parades. No ribbons. Few fund raisers. No early detection. Insurance doesn't pay for the few monitoring tests there are. It sucks so many ways, that you have no idea.
jobs has the opportunity to educate, enlighten and inform, and yeah, I'm really pissed that he is acting like it might be a social disease.
01/28/09
01/26/09
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01/26/09
And don't eat the hospital cabbage.