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Country singer Toby Keith died Monday night at age 62, more than two years after being diagnosed with stomach cancer.
In June 2022, Keith announced in X that he had been diagnosed in the fall of 2021 and had already received chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.
Then, last June, he he told The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City that his tumor had shrunk by a third and that he was continuing chemotherapy. He also received immunotherapy, she said, a drug that helps the immune system destroy cancer cells.
His death has prompted renewed calls for doctors to pay attention to signs of stomach cancer, including heartburn, acid reflux, anemia, nausea, ulcers, pain after eating, sudden weight loss or feeling full afterward. of eating small amounts.
“A lot of these things are relatively innocuous. But of course, with cancer, that’s how it attacks you,” said Dr. Fabian Johnston, chief of the division of gastrointestinal oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Johnston said doctors and patients may be inclined to dismiss symptoms like acid reflux as harmless, which can delay diagnosis. By the time symptoms appear, many already have advanced disease, she said.
He The average age of diagnosis is 68 years.and men have a slightly higher risk.
The American Cancer Society Dear All It is estimated that nearly 27,000 new cases of stomach cancer will be diagnosed this year, although the disease remains relatively rare, accounting for about 1.5% of new cancers diagnosed in the United States each year.
Overall rates of stomach cancer diagnoses have also decreased slightly over the past 10 years. But Rates among adults under 50 are increasing.for reasons that are unclear.
“There is something happening — something we eat, something we ingest, some combination of modern and present factors — that is resulting in an increase in cancers in young people,” said Dr. Ben Schlechter, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist. at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Schlechter said alcohol and tobacco, once common contributors to stomach cancer, are now associated with a minority of cases in the U.S., perhaps because people smoke less.
Instead, many new cases are found in people with chronic acid reflux or infections with a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, which can cause inflammation in the stomach. However, scientists have not determined why some people with these conditions get stomach cancer and most do not.
For many patients right now, “it’s a bad luck disease,” Schlechter said. “Maybe there is an association with H. pylori infection. “There may be a history of heartburn or reflux, but it’s usually not that clear.”
Schlechter said stomach cancer is generally aggressive compared to other cancers.
“This does not mean that people are dying imminently. It just means that the tools we have to cure them are quite limited,” she stated. “People are doing pretty well compared to 15 years ago, but we’re barely at the level of, say, breast cancer, where the vast majority of people are cured with surgery and chemotherapy and things like that.”
Up to 95% of stomach cancers in the US They are adenocarcinomas, which begin in the innermost lining of the stomach. From there, the cancer can spread to the stomach wall, body of the stomach, or lymph nodes.
Patients whose cancer has not spread often undergo or receive chemotherapy or immunotherapy or a combination of these options, said Dr. Rutika Mehta, a medical oncologist in the Gastrointestinal Oncology Program at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.
“In more advanced cases, we are not yet at a point where we can offer patients a ‘cure,'” Mehta wrote by email. However, he added that chemotherapy or immunotherapy can help prolong life.
Doctors are also getting better at matching patients with treatments that target specific proteins associated with stomach cancer. For example, some stomach cancers express a gene called HER2, which is also linked to breast cancer.
“Drugs that work in HER2 breast cancer work to some extent in HER2 gastric cancer. “So now we can give those drugs to people with stomach cancer and substantially increase the benefits of the treatment,” Schlechter said.
Although the disease’s outcomes are “generally bad,” he said, they are “much better than they used to be.”
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