Blogger Woody Weingarten celebrates Nancy Fox''s 85th birthday at lunch with her daughter

Woody, Laura, and Nancy.

Today would have been the 85th birthday of my wife, Nancy Fox. I laughed aloud and wept with her daughter, Laura Schifrin, at lunch in one of Nance’s favorite restaurants. 

Most of my days are like that now — up and down, up and down, just like the rollercoaster we rode for more than three decades while we celebrated an extraordinarily happy marriage, life, and journey joined at the hip.

Nancy died May 2. I miss her more than words will ever convey. 

Having finished her cancer chemo treatment, Princess Kate plans more public engagements

Britain's Princess Kate says her chemotherapy treatment for cancer is complete, so she intends to do more public appearances.

That information appears in a story by Karla Adam in editions of The Washington Post earlier this week.

The past nine months, Kate Middleton says, "have been incredibly tough for us as a family."

Princess Kate

Kate — more formally known as Catherine, Princess of Wales, has largely been out of public view since Christmas. 

Buckingham Palace insists the royal is entitled to her medical privacy, and she's not disclosed the site of the cancer.

The princess, who's in line to be a future queen, is expected to at least "attend a Remembrance Sunday service, a fixture of the royal calendar that commemorates those who died in Britain's wars," the Post piece notes.

Kate released the chemo information via a three-minute video. "The cancer journey," she says in the voice-over, "is complex, scary, and unpredictable for everyone, especially those closest to you. With humility, it also brings you face to face with your own vulnerabilities in a way you have never considered before, and with that, a new perspective on everything."

She then adds, "To all those who are continuing their own cancer journey — I remain with you."

A spokesperson for the palace says that King Charles III and Queen Camilla consider the announcement details "to be wonderful news" and will continue to offer "love, thoughts, and support to the princess on her continued path to full recovery."

The king, her father-in-law, was diagnosed with his own cancer earlier this year. He returned to a schedule of public engagements in April on a basis more limited than usual.

Additional information about the multi-pronged disease can be found in Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed particularly at male caregivers.

Experts unsure why breast cancer is spiking among Asian American, Pacific Islander women

The latest federal data "shows the rate of new breast cancer diagnoses in Asian American and Pacific Islander women…is rising much faster than that of many other racial and ethnic groups."

That information appears in a story by Philip Reese in last week's San Francisco Chronicle.

Reese reports that the category "once had relatively low rates of diagnosis" and he suggests that experts are befuddled as to why the increase has occurred. 

His article cites the fact that the latest statistics show the trend "is especially sharp" in women in the group under 50 — with the latest figure "surpassing the rate for black and Hispanic women and on a par with the rate for white women, according to age-adjusted data from the National Institutes of Health."

The stats show the increased rate for the younger age group had jumped about 52% from 2000 to 2021, with rates for those 50 to 64 climbing 33% and those 65 and older 43% during that period.

By comparison, the story contends, "the rate for women of all ages, races, and ethnicities" grew by only 3%.

Experts suspect the answer to the "why" is "complex, ranging from cultural shifts to pressure-filled lifestyles," Reese writes.

Dr. Helen Chew

He then quotes Dr. Helen Chew, director of the Clinical Breast Cancer Program at UC Davis Health, as saying that simple answers aren't obvious and that although "it's a real trend," it's "difficult to tease out exactly why" that trend is happening.

"Is it because of many things culturally where they may not want to come in if they see something on heir breast?" she asks.

Scarlett Gomez, PhD

Scarlett Gomez, PhD professor and epidemiologist at UCSF's Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, explains that "we're seeing somewhere almost around a 4% per-year increase," then suggests that "one of the hypotheses that we're exploring…is the role of…different sources of stress, different coping styles throughout the lifetime."

Reese's article also notes that "rates of pancreatic, thyroid, colon, and endometrial cancer, along with non-Hodgkin lymphoma rates, have also recently risen significantly among Asian American and Pacific Islander women under 50, NIH data show."

For more information on Asian American and Pacific Islander women, check out Rollercoaster: How a man can survive breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.

Debunked cancer study about blood tests has wide ripple effects, Wall Street Journal reports

Research groups that have relied on data from an apparently flawed cancer study now must deal with criticism of the original findings.

Steven Salzberg, PhD

That's the conclusion of Steven Salzberg, a PhD computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, according to a story by Nidhi Subbaraman in The Wall Street Journal last week.

Salzberg, whose critique, written with colleagues in the field, led to the study's recent retraction, is quoted as saying the faulty conclusions have "polluted the literature."

The WSJ piece says the lead researcher, Professor Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego, had indicated the 2020 study had "reported that 32 different cancers, from prostate tumors to skin melanomas, harbored unique combinations of microbes, chiefly bacteria and viruses, that acted as fingerprints for each type of tumor. The idea had clinical significance: A blood test could allow physicians to use evidence of microbes detected in the blood as a proxy to diagnose the cancers."

Since the study's publication in 2020 in Nature magazine, more than 600 papers have cited it, Subbraman's article says, and at least a dozen groups based new work on its data. 

In addition, the initial co-researchers had "launched a startup to capitalize on their findings" — although support for it "has dried up" since the criticism became public.

Knight, "a heavyweight in the field of microbiology," the WSJ piece adds, had been "widely regarded as a pioneer of big-date microbial analysis. His resume lists multiple awards and prestigious fellowships at scientific societies, two books and a TED talk."

The original study analyzed data from more than 17,000 samples from over 10,000 people with cancer.

Among the problems discovered was that "some microbes the researchers flagged as components of cancer signatures weren't known to exist in humans." To boot, the critics, whose work was published in the journal mBio, apparently couldn't find "most of the bacteria reported in the Nature study."

Salzberg told The World Street Journal that "it wasn't a close call. This data is completely wrong."

According to the story, a wide ripple effect has followed the criticism: "The publishers and journal editors of eight studies have been reviewing the papers."

More details on studies that had to be retracted can be found in Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.