Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the leading scorer in NBA history has been diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia.

From the Associated Press:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is being treated for a rare form of leukemia, and the basketball great said his prognosis is encouraging.

The NBA’s all-time leading scorer was diagnosed last December with chronic myeloid leukemia, he told The Associated Press on Monday.

The 62-year-old Abdul-Jabbar said his doctor didn’t give any guarantees, but informed him: “You have a very good chance to live your life out and not have to make any drastic changes to your lifestyle.”

Abdul-Jabbar is taking an oral medication for the disease. He is a paid spokesman for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which makes a drug that treats the illness.

Citing the way Los Angeles Lakers teammate Magic Johnson brought awareness to HIV, Abdul-Jabbar said he wants to do the same for his form of blood cancer, which can be fatal if left untreated.

“I’ve never been a person to share my private life. But I can help save lives,” he said at a midtown Manhattan conference room. “It’s incumbent on someone like me to talk about this.”

 Men with prostate cancer are being diagnosed at a younger age and earlier stage today than in years past, and the racial disparity in stage at diagnosis has decreased significantly, researchers report today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “Traditionally, Blacks are diagnosed with prostate cancer at a later stage compared with Whites,” and are more likely to die of the disease, study co-author Dr. Grace L. Lu-Yao of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in New Brunswick, told Reuters Health. Lu-Yao and colleagues analyzed 2004-2005 data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program on more than 82,500 prostate cancer patients. They compared this group with patients diagnosed in 1988-1989 and 1996-1997. The average age at diagnosis decreased from about 72 years in 1988-1989 to about 67 years in 2004-2005 and the rate of particularly late-stage cases fell from about 53 to 8 per 100,000 among Whites and from 91 to 13 per 100,000 among Blacks. Based on the 2004-2005 data, the vast majority of men had cases diagnosed when they had not yet spread, Lu-Yao said. Lu-Yao credited prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for the earlier diagnoses. While that test is recommended by some medical groups, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force “concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of prostate cancer screening in men younger than age 75 years” and that men over the age of 75 should not be screened. The questions over screening come from the fact that many prostate cancers are slow-growing and may not be deadly, while the treatments can have significant side effects. The current study also “is the first nationwide study to document that the racial disparity in prostate cancer stage at diagnosis has decreased substantially during the period from 1988 to 2005,” Lu-Yao noted.

Black lung cancer patients are less likely than White patients to receive recommended chemotherapy and surgery, reports HealthDayNews.com, citing a new study. In fact, the study found, the racial gap in the treatments were as stark in 2002 as they were more than a decade earlier – despite the efforts over the years to diminish inequalities in treatment. “This study shows what most of the previous research has shown – that disparities in treatment patterns [still exist] between [B]lacks and [W]hites,” said Katherine S. Virgo, director of health services research the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the study. Researchers learned that African Americans early-stage cancer were 37 percent less likely to get recommended surgery and 42 percent less likely to receive recommended chemotherapy, compared with Whites, according to the findings, which were published in the April 13 online edition of the journal Cancer. “Among patients with later-stage lung cancer, [B]lacks were 57 percent less likely to receive recommended chemotherapy than [W]hites, HealthDayNews.com reports.

While it’s nothing new that Black women have a lower overall rate of breast cancer than their White counterparts, a new study concludes that they are three times more likely than women of other races to develop more aggressive breast cancer. This cancer is also more likely to return after treatment and has a less favorable outcome. The study, which appears in the journal Breast Cancer Research, found that Black women are three times more likely to acquire something called a triple negative tumor, which is diagnosed before or after age 50 regardless of weight. The higher prevalence of these triple negative tumors in all age and weight categories likely contributes to the unfavorable breast cancer prognosis, the study shows.

Red Meat Could Be Ticket to Early Grave
Here’s a tip for those wanting to live a long and healthy life: Leave the hotdogs, burgers and spareribs alone. That’s right, a new study shows that those who make a daily habit of acting out their carnivorous propensities have a higher risk of suffering from maladies like heart disease and cancer over a 10-year period. In other words, munching on red meat marks a shortcut to the grave. “This is the biggest and highest quality study like this,” says Barry M. Popkin, Ph.D., from the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, which was published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine. “They collected the diet data very carefully, and it’s saying to people, ‘You don’t have to eat red meat every day.’” The decade-long study of more than a half-million people found that “people who ate the most red meat every day (about 62.5 grams per 1,000 calories per day, equivalent to a quarter-pound burger or small steak per day) had about a 30-percent greater risk of dying compared with those who consumed the least amount of red meat (a median of 9.8 grams per 1,000 calories per day),” ABC/Reuters News reports. “The excess mortality was mostly the result of cardiovascular disease and cancer.” The study, conducted by a research team led by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D., from the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md., looked at all types of beef and pork, including bacon, cold cuts, ham, hamburgers, hot dogs, and steak, as well as meat in pizza, chili, lasagna, and stew.

Black Boys More Likely to Suffer Food Allergies
Nobody is at greater risk of food allergies than Black boys. A study presented at this year’s annual Meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, revealed that non-Hispanic Black boys and boys of low-income families are more prone to be sensitive to foods, particularly peanuts and shrimp, than other children.

Pioneers for Peace leader needs public support. One of the nation’s best-known activists against gun violence is up against a new opponent: cancer. Weusi Olusola, president of Pioneers for Peace, has been diagnosed with Stage 4 of the illness and told that he has six months to live. Known throughout the nation among urban peace activists, Olusola has appeared on TV episodes of “Judge Hatchett,” “Maury Povich,” CNN and even in Good Housekeeping magazine. He and the Pioneers for Peace – all survivors of gun attacks – have spoken at hundreds of schools, youth rallies and other functions. Under Olusola’s leadership, the organization even received praise from ex-President George W. Bush, who issued a “Daily Point of Light” award. Olusola’s recent diagnosis left him unable to make public appearances to support his family, and he only recently received medical insurance. The Park West Foundation for youth plans a March event to honor Olusola and collect donations to help him. “This is an opportunity for Weusi to receive back some of the love he’s given,” says program director Saba Gebrai. “After 23 years of working in the community, he deserves it.” A former high school basketball star, Olusola was left wheelchair-bound at 16 after he was shot in Detroit. He has since committed his life to helping end gang and youth violence. For information about how to help Weusi, visit the Web site .

 San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego are hooking up to eliminate the disparity in cancer deaths between different minority and ethnic groups and to determine which types of outreach, education, training and prevention methods are most appropriate across populations. The funding for the project is provided through a five-year $15 million grant from the National Cancer Institute ( NCI ) of the National Institutes of Health and education and community outreach programs in the San Diego region, reports Media-Newswire.com. “Because we have such diversity here in San Diego, the issue of cancer disparity is acute,” said Partnership co-principal investigator Stanley Maloy, Ph.D., dean of San Diego State’s College of Sciences. “This new collaboration between SDSU and UC San Diego is a true partnership that will make inroads in this important area of cancer research and directly benefit the health of San Diegans.” The partnership is the only such program in California. John Carethers, professor of medicine and chief of the division of gastroenterology at UC-San Diego, said that the project aims to “develop a stronger national cancer program aimed at understanding the reasons behind the significant cancer disparities and the impact on minority populations. “This award helps address sometimes neglected cancer research that is specific to minority populations, particularly here in the San Diego area.” More American White women develop breast cancer, but African-American women are 15 percent more likely to die from the disease, statistics show. African Americans have the highest rates for colorectal cancer of any racial group in the United States and have higher rates of prostate cancer and present at younger ages than other groups. While breast cancer is diagnosed about 40 percent less often in Hispanic women than in non-Hispanic women, it is more frequently diagnosed at a later stage in Hispanics. Cancer treatment for minority populations, particularly those in poor communities, generally lags behind non-minority groups.

Black gay and bisexual men are less likely to get screened for prostate cancer than men of any other racial and ethnic backgrounds regardless of their sexual orientation, a new study by a researcher at Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science reveals. Citing his study, which is published in the December issue of Medical Care, Medical News Today reports that Kevin C. Heslin based his examinations of prostate and colorectal testing rates on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Using telephone  interviews with 19,410 men who participated in the California Health Interview Survey, he discovered that there was no overall difference in the use of the prostate-specific antigen (or PSA) test among gay, bisexual and heterosexual men. Still, he found, “the percentage of gay and bisexual Black men who received the PSA test was 12 percent to 14 percent lower than heterosexual Blacks and 15 percent to 28 percent lower than gay and bisexual Whites,” Medical News Today reports. Said Heslin: “Gay and bisexual Black men had the lowest use of the PSA test, compared with every other group of men in the study. For Blacks, being a member of both racial and sexual minority groups represents a kind of double jeopardy when it comes to getting PSA testing.” So why are the findings so significant? Heslin notes that Black men are more likely to be diagnosed late with prostate cancer and, as a result, are more likely to die from the disease than any other racial or ethnic group.

Black lung cancer patients have a different gene.  A lung cancer known as non-small cell lung tumors tend to have a different genetic makeup in Blacks than in Whites, which scientists say may explain why Blacks do not do as well in treatment as Whites, a new study found. Blacks with this type of lung cancer typically do not fare well, based on past studies. Blacks who have this type of lung cancer have a gene mutation that causes it to have fewer receptors that cause the cancer not to respond to the current treatments, according to researchers who presented their findings Nov. 13 at the 2008 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology. “The findings of this study were surprising, since it was not expected that drug-sensitizing EGFR mutations would be so rare in this patient population,” study co-author Dr. Rom Leidner, a clinical fellow in hematology/oncology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said in a news release. “African-American patients remain underrepresented in clinical studies in oncology, and therefore our knowledge base about how to modify our treatment strategies for this patient population remains poorly defined.” The study’s researchers said they hope their findings influence the design of future clinical studies and the future use of EGFR-targeted agents.  However, they said their efforts because they have a hard time finding enough African Americans to participate in clinical drug trials. The American Cancer Society has more about non-small cell lung cancer.
Vitamin C and E pills don’t fight cancer. Stop stuffing down vitamin pills, thinking they’ll protect you from cancer. There’s new evidence that they simply don’t work that way. Vital Signs has the latest research and what to do instead of popping pills.

Here’s help for saving Thanksgiving. With costs for the Thanksgiving meal up by at least 5 percent, and uncertainty about the economy looming over the holidays, eveyone is trying to cut expenses wherever they can. BET.com’s Body & Soul has some suggestions for saving Thanksgiving.

Only 2 percent of cancer docs are Black, 3 percent Hispanic.

  Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the American Society of Clinical Oncology have partnered to create the Komen/ASCO Diversity in Oncology Initiative, which hopes to reduce health care disparities by boosting the number of minority cancer docs, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Minorities disproportionately are affected by several forms of cancer, but only 2 percent of oncologists in the United States are Black; 3 percent are Hispanic, according to the Plain Dealer report.  “The gaps in disparity, especially in oncology, can only be closed with (the addition of more) individuals who are culturally competent, who in some way are able to relate and feel comfortable to these patients,” said Derek Raghavan, director of the Taussig Cancer Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and co-chair of ASCO’s Health Disparities Advisory Group. Socioeconomic factors, language and literacy barriers and a mistrust of the medical community also contribute to minorities’ access to quality health care, health experts say. “The ultimate endpoint is to improve survival rates,” Raghavan added. Using a multimillion-dollar grant from Komen over the next two years, the initiative will give monetary awards to support medical students with oncology rotations and a mentor; oncologists or oncology fellows who have completed training; and loan repayments; and travel to annual ASCO meetings.
Black women in Florida county die younger than others. Black women are dying at a younger age than White women from a number of conditions, including HIV/AIDS, heart disease and diabetes, The Florida Times-Union reports. The report by the county Center for Health Statistics is based on government figures form 2006. It looks at the years of potential life lost, which, according to center coordinator Rebecca Filipowicz, tabulates “years that were lost that shouldn’t have been.” The barometer for Black women is nearly 50 percent higher than for Whites, she said. “As with a lot of the health issues we study, there’re major health disparities, especially with race and geographic distribution.” Women living in primarily Black Jacksonville communities had the highest rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Filipowicz said that even though such conditions are preventable, many women cannot afford health care or they might not know enough about their health to recognize a problem. The report noted that about one in five Black women was uninsured, compared with one in 10 White women. A similar report released earlier this year focusing on men also found that Blacks were dying from preventable diseases, in large part because of limited access to medical care, according to the Times-Union.