Almost immediately after being diagnosed along with breast cancer in September 2012, Oliver Bogler, PhD, that works at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Focus in Houston, began writing the Entering a Globe of Pink blog.
Even though he now has actually no evidence of disease, Dr Bogler continues to write the blog and it continues to be noticed. Earlier this week, National Public Radio’s popular Morning Edition aired a story concerning him or her and the blog.
Given the blog’s title, it may be a good guess to suppose that the writing is concerning a man that is a stranger in a strange world, moving cautiously amid a health problem that overwhelmingly occurs in women.
But it turns out that would certainly be a unsatisfactory guess.
From the moment of his diagnosis, Dr Bogler deep dives — “enter” is too mild a word — in to the Globe of breast cancer and surfaces not merely as a blogger, However as an advocate, community member, shirtless model, conceptual artist, and media subject. In each of these roles, he seeks to modification the status of male breast cancer, especially its neglected research funding.
This every one of took root in the 9 months after his diagnosis, while he underwent chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation and maintained his job at M.D. Anderson.
“Throughout the initial year or so, I focused the blog on my personal cancer quest and wrote fairly often,” Dr Bogler told Medscape Medical News in an email.
Even though he is a laboratory scientist that specializes in brain tumors and is a professor of neurosurgery, Dr Bogler was intimately acquainted along with breast cancer prior to his diagnosis. His wife, Irene, that is a cancer researcher at M.D. Anderson, had been diagnosed along with breast cancer in 2007.
The story concerning a man and wife the two diagnosed along with stage II breast cancer at 46 years of age was covered by a local Houston television station then selected up by news outlets across the globe. That coverage included a report in the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, which is the Internet’s most trafficked news site.
Dr Bogler’s diagnosis came merely weeks after his wife was declared disease-free, so he knew concerning breast cancer. However he was promptly reminded that relatively little is known concerning the health problem in men.
In October 2012, Dr Bogler and his treatment group decided on 6 months of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in the chance of stopping or reversing tumor growth, Despite the fact that it is not clear whether long term outcomes are much better as quickly as surgery follows chemotherapy.
This strategy comes from studies of women, Dr Bogler reported.
“Of course, for male breast cancer there is no data at all, since it is rare, and so we are assuming, as most do, that the findings in breast cancer in women is transferable,” he writes.
On October 8, Dr Bogler joined the breast cancer community for the initial time and participated in a breast cancer social media tweetup. The #bcsm tweetup event, in which tweeters meet in person, takes place every Monday at 8 pm local time so that “individuals get hold of with each other for a conversation,” he writes.
In the next half year, his ongoing participation on the planet of social media resulted in his blog being cited by Elizabeth MacKenzie, an established breast cancer blogger that writes the My Eyes Are Up Here blog. “As a guy in the breast cancer world, these welcomes and connections are quite much appreciated,” Dr Bogler writes.
In 2104, he was invited to participate in a discussion on the use of social media to raise participation in clinical trials at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, along along with two oncologists along with a highly visible Twitter presence — Robert Miller (@rsm2800) and Mike Thompson (@mtmdphd).
Participate in research for your kids.
Participation in research is the subject of one his earliest blog posts. “get hold of the very best treatment for yourself, today. Participate in research for your kids, tomorrow,” he writes, and mentions that he is section of two biomarker registry trials.
Cancer research is the repeated focus of Dr Bogler’s writing, which is fitting for a person that is senior vice president of academic affairs at M.D. Anderson.
He regularly scans journals and posts summaries of Brand-new studies on male breast cancer in the Paper Report section of his blog.
While recovering from his modified radical mastectomy, he explored the Globe of breast cancer research funding to learn exactly how male health problem fared.
Using a grants database, he determined that there were 9491 breast cancer research grants from private and public funders in the United States from 2009 to early 2013, which totaled $4.8 billion.
However, Dr Bolger noticed there were only 5 hits on the search term “male breast cancer” in the database. And “none of these grants were focused exclusively on this form of the disease,” he writes.
This prompted Dr Bogler to point out that concerning 1% of every one of breast cancers occur in men, and to call for the serious agencies in the United States that fund breast cancer research (National Institutes of Good health and Susan G. Komen for the Cure) to give a lot more cash for projects that contain men. “1% of funding would certainly be $14M per year, and represent a 20x increase. Please think of it,” he writes.
There are “two big challenges about research for male breast cancer,” Dr Bogler told Medscape Medical News.
“One is lack of funding for fundamental explorations of the biology of male breast cancer, compared along with female breast cancer,” he said. This research would certainly find out whether treating men along with the “same approach as women actually gives the very best feasible outcome.”
The second challenge is reasonable access to clinical trials. “Men are excluded from two-thirds of clinical trials on breast cancer based on sex alone, as quickly as perhaps in several instances they would certainly be eligible based on their disease,” he noted. He argues that men need to be included in trials unless there are “sound reasons” for exclusion.
Dr Bogler initial discovered the extent of this exclusion in Might 2013, after his surgery. He ran an analysis of the clinicaltrials.gov website and discovered that of the 4826 breast cancer trials listed, only 32% allowed the enrollment of the two men and women. The rest were women-only.
At concerning this time, Dr Bogler participated in the SCAR Project: Male Breast Cancer, which is a companion to the well-known images of women along with surgery scars by fashion photographer David Jay. A report on the project, published in the New York Times, included comments from Dr Bogler and an image of him or her posing naked from the waist up. He has actually described the photos as “unflinching.”
In the spring of 2013, Dr Bogler was joined by M.D. Anderson breast cancer expert Sharon Giordano, MD, for a podcast concerning male breast cancer. By this point, he had talked, blogged, posed, and broadcasted concerning male breast cancer, and yet his treatment was still not complete.
As if these mediums were not enough, in Might 2013, after his surgery, Dr Bogler made an art installation called Tumor in a Box for the annual faculty art exhibition at M.D. Anderson. after that he earned a video of the project, which he posted online.
In June 2013, Dr Bogler finished his radiotherapy and his cancer treatment was finally complete. However he still must take tamoxifen for 5 years. “My tumor, enjoy most male breast cancer, is highly ER/PR positive, and so the good news (yay! good news!) is that it need to respond actually well to tamoxifen. along with 95% positivity for the hormone receptors, this need to job well,” he writes.
Soon after Dr Bogler and his wife told their two school-aged kids concerning his diagnosis, his son said: “Dad, it’s lucky you were diagnosed in breast cancer awareness month.” Dr Bogler explains to his readers outside the United States “that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month here, and there is pink everywhere.”
We, as patients and scientists, are riding a big wave…towards much better answers for breast cancer…and that wave is largely pink.
Dr Bogler says that pink is not his color, personally: “Believe me, as a guy along with breast cancer, pink doesn’t speak to me.” However he appreciates and salutes pink as a phenomenon.
“I acknowledge a wonderful debt to the movement. We, as patients and scientists, are riding a big wave of awareness, cultural acceptance, and funding towards much better answers for breast cancer, and every one of cancer, and that wave is largely pink,” he writes.
His take on pink is nuanced.
“I don’t deny the downside. The transition from awareness to complacency is frequently swift. The feeling that one can easily accessorize oneself from the problem is near at hand. However I would certainly say we have to tweak the pink message, not eliminate the pink (as if we could…). In my opinion, the only answer to cancer is prevention and research. If the pink is tied to prevention and research, and this is explicit, after that it is good,” he explains.
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