BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — “Neuroendocrine cancer is not one disease, it’s a bouquet of disease or a spectrum of disease,” Dr. Aman Chauhan, Medical Oncologist said.
According to the American Cancer Society, in the U.S. 1 in 3 people will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime. Chauhan is a medical oncologist and he said a disease called neuroendocrine cancer is something that many doctors are unaware of.
“It is a rare cancer because only seven to eight people when hundred thousand people develop one or the form of neuroendocrine cancers,” Chauhan said.
Chauhan explains how there are two major subcategories of this disease. He also mentioned how multiple celebrities died from this mutational cancer.
“One are called neuroendocrine tumors, now this is a disease which you might recall Steve Jobs unfortunately passed away from, he had pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. Another celebrity Aretha Franklin, famous singer, we lost to neuroendocrine tumor,” Chauhan said.
The other category of this disease is neuroendocrine carcinoma. It can spread anywhere in the body and symptoms are not always visible at first. Doctors can either misdiagnose or diagnose a patient too late.
The National Cancer Institute showed the burden cancer can cause.
- Cancer is among the leading causes of death worldwide
- By 2040, the number of new cancer cases per year is expected to rise to 29.5 million and the number of cancer-related deaths to 16.4 million.
- Generally, cancer rates are highest in countries whose populations have the highest life expectancy, education level, and standard of living.
“It has been a big problem in any rare cancer, the late detection. Once they are diagnosed the time it takes them to reach a specialist or have a treatment in place, there’s a big delay in that,” said Chauhan.
