Brain Brawn & Body Your Daily Dose July 17
Dear Reader:
Blood cancers: the more we know the better we can be.
Our work with the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, Wisconsin Chapter, has alerted us to the disparate conditions that exist around blood cancers. Outreach efforts directed toward African Americans have been slowly developing over the last few years, but prior to this time, those responsible for informing communities of color admit that they simply didn’t know how to effectively communicate to those audiences.
As a result, little was known about blood cancers, leukemia in particular, in the Black community.
Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells. White blood cells help your body fight infection. Your blood cells form in your bone marrow. In leukemia, the bone marrow produces abnormal white blood cells. These cells crowd the healthy blood cells, making it hard for blood to do its work. In chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), there are too many lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell.
CLL is the second most common type of leukemia in adults. It often occurs during or after middle age, and is rare in children.
Usually CLL does not cause any symptoms. If you have symptoms, they may include:
• Painless swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck, underarm, stomach, or groin
• Fatigue
• Pain or a feeling of fullness below the ribs
• Fever and infection
• Weight loss
Tests that examine the blood, bone marrow, and lymph nodes diagnose CLL. Your doctor may choose to just monitor you until symptoms appear or change. Treatments include radiation therapy, chemotherapy, surgery to remove the spleen, and targeted therapy. Targeted therapy uses substances that attack cancer cells without harming normal cells.
Even With Equal Care, Racial Disparity Persists in Blood Cancer,
Blacks with chronic lymphocytic leukemia fare worse than whites
Black Americans with blood cancer do not live as long as white patients with the disease, a new study finds, even when they receive equal levels of care.
Researchers looked at 84 black patients and more than 1,500 non-black patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which is a rare disease in blacks. All patients received the same treatments.
The time from diagnosis to referral for treatment was shorter for blacks than whites, but blacks were more likely to have more advanced CLL at the time of referral.
Blacks responded as well as whites to first-line treatment, but their cancer progressed more rapidly, and their survival time was shorter.
This shorter survival time among blacks persisted even after the researchers grouped patients according to factors related to the severity of their disease, according to the study, which was published online July 8 in the journal Cancer.
The findings indicate that biological factors may account for racial differences in survival among patients with CLL, the researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., said in a journal news release.
For reasons that are unclear, minorities tend to have worse cancer outcomes than whites. In black patients, poverty and limited access to high-quality care often play a role, but some experts believe that certain cancers can be more aggressive in minority patients.
By Robert Preidt
Even With Equal Care, Racial Disparity Persists in Blood Cancer,
Blacks with chronic lymphocytic leukemia fare worse than whites
Black Americans with blood cancer do not live as long as white patients with the disease, a new study finds, even when they receive equal levels of care.
Researchers looked at 84 black patients and more than 1,500 non-black patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which is a rare disease in blacks. All patients received the same treatments.
The time from diagnosis to referral for treatment was shorter for blacks than whites, but blacks were more likely to have more advanced CLL at the time of referral.
Blacks responded as well as whites to first-line treatment, but their cancer progressed more rapidly, and their survival time was shorter.
This shorter survival time among blacks persisted even after the researchers grouped patients according to factors related to the severity of their disease, according to the study, which was published online July 8 in the journal Cancer.
The findings indicate that biological factors may account for racial differences in survival among patients with CLL, the researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., said in a journal news release.
For reasons that are unclear, minorities tend to have worse cancer outcomes than whites. In black patients, poverty and limited access to high-quality care often play a role, but some experts believe that certain cancers can be more aggressive in minority patients.
By Robert Preidt
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Eric Von
Publisher/Editor
