Last night, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of banking giant JPMorgan JPMorgan, advised workers that he is currently being taken care of for throat cancer. In a memo, he mentioned that he would start eight weeks of chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
He wrote:
The excellent information is that the prognosis from my physicians is excellent, the cancer was caught quickly, and my condition is curable. Following thorough exams that included a CAT scan, PET scan and a biopsy, the cancer is confined to the original website and the adjacent lymph nodes on the correct side of my neck. Importantly, there is no proof of cancer elsewhere in my body.
It’s not possible to speculate on Dimon’s cancer beyond what he put in his memo. I contacted JPMorgan and the company could not verify any other specifics about his circumstances. But it’s extremely feasible that Dimon has been swept up, along with thousands of other men, by an increasingly widespread disease: throat cancer induced by infection with the human papilloma virus, or HPV.
“It wouldn’t be uncommon,” says Eric Genden, chief of head and neck oncology at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “This is an epidemic.”
In 2008, the last yr for which information are obtainable, the Centers for Illness Management & Prevention estimate that 2,370 females and 9,356 guys produced HPV-caused head and neck cancer, about a third of the situations of head and neck cancer that year.
HPV surpassed other brings about of throat cancer in 2004.
But Genden says that 70% to 90% of head and neck cancer situations worldwide are now triggered by HPV the American Cancer Society American Cancer Society estimates that this yr, there will be 42,440 instances of head and neck cancer in the U.S.
Historically, head and neck cancer patients were older men who smoke and drank heavily. The alcohol and tobacco damaged the cells in the throat, eventually top to cancer.
HPV-induced cancer is diverse. The men (and it is still primarily males) who get it are younger. In a series of situations at Mount Sinai, they had been in between 35 and 65.
Five years ago, I profiled Maura Gillison, the Ohio State University researcher who assisted create that this was a massive problem. She told me how when enrolling a examine a number of many years in the past, she’d recruited, in sequence, a malpractice lawyer, medical doctor, a scientist and a rear admiral. The initial patient I spoke to about his HPV throat cancer was a consultant and economist who later on died from his illness. Two many years ago, I wrote about a 50-12 months-old biotech CEO who also had HPV throat cancer. Last 12 months, the actor Michael Douglas said that his throat cancer was brought on by HPV.
The stage is that these are men significantly like Dimon: CEOs and consultants, men at the peak of their lives and professional electrical power. And their numbers are escalating.
The chart above shows the complete quantity of throat cancer instances, and also the amount brought on by HPV and the sum that weren’t, between patients in Hawaii, Iowa, and Los Angeles. As you can see, in 2004 the HPV cancers started to outnumber the kind caused by smoking and drinking.
How do you get HPV cancer? HPV is sexually transmitted. It is mainly recognized as a lead to of cervical cancer, which is what occurs when it infects girls. But men can get it by executing cunnilingus. It’s also possible, though significantly less probably, that it can be transmitted by kissing. Eighty percent of sexually lively individuals amongst the ages of 14 and 44 have had oral intercourse with an opposite intercourse spouse. Researchers estimate that HPV throat cancer in men will be much more common than cervical cancer in women in the U.S.
Most strains of HPV do not result in cancer, both in the throat or the cervix. And most HPV infections are cleared by the entire body. But in a minority of instances, perhaps ten%, they persist. If the strain is of the right selection – for instance, the HPV 16 strain of the virus – this infection can ultimately lead to cancer. When it comes to throat cancer, this method requires decades.
The very good information is that throat cancer induced by HPV is far less deadly than the outdated sort that resulted from persistent tobacco use and drinking. Some researchers have cited data that it is 80% curable. In a series of 500 individuals who were early in their condition conducting at Sinai, far more than 90% had been nonetheless cancer free of charge 5 many years after surgical procedure. And in that examine Sinai was deliberately utilizing less invasive surgical procedure and skipping chemotherapy and radiation in the curiosity of sparing men side effects.
1 hope is that the vaccines designed to avoid HPV infection in women – Gardasil, from Merck Merck, and Cervarix, from GlaxoSmithKline GlaxoSmithKline – could avert HPV infection in the throat and, consequently, cancer later on on. But there is no way to show this. Drug companies funded scientific studies showing the vaccines prevented the formation of precancerous lesions in the cervix, but there’s no way to do one thing equivalent in the throat.
“I consider the downside of getting the HPV vaccine in young boys is so minimal and the prospective upside is so substantial that I advocate it,” says Genden. “Do we have evidence that it prevents oropharangeal cancer in boys? No.”
Why Thousands Of Males Like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Are Getting Throat Cancer
