Steve Jobs’s Letter Does Little to Clear Up Health Mystery
The uncertain status of Apple's chief leaves many people wondering
Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s remarks about his health issues may have sparked a rise in the company’s shares, but they did very little to indicate exactly what’s wrong with him, three doctors who are not involved with his care say.
In a public letter posted on Apple's website, Jobs—who in 2004 was treated for a rare pancreatic cancer—said that his doctors believe they’ve found the cause of the persistent weight loss he experienced last year. The culprit: “a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy,” Jobs wrote. After “sophisticated blood tests” confirmed the diagnosis, he’s begun treatment for this “nutritional problem.” The remedy is “relatively simple and straightforward,” Jobs said.
But his statement is anything but simple and straightforward, physicians who aren’t treating Jobs say. Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco, points out that the key elements in his statement—the hormone imbalance, protein “robbing,” and simple remedy for what Jobs calls a nutritional problem—do not clearly point to a single diagnosis. “These three medical threads don’t add up to a strong cable,” Lustig says. That means the problem could be related to Jobs's bout with pancreatic cancer...or it might be a completely separate health issue. “You cannot make a diagnosis” from the letter, Lustig says.
“Hormone imbalance” is vague, and the phrase suggests some kind of endocrine disorder. These can be insidious and tough to diagnose, says Lustig, and often produce vague symptoms, including fatigue and weight loss. Jobs may have an endocrine disorder that is totally unrelated to his previous bout with cancer. Or the problem may be an aftereffect of his surgery; people who have a substantial proportion of their pancreas removed may later develop diabetes, says James Yao, deputy department chair of gastrointestinal medical oncology at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
But the weight loss might also signal a recurrence or a new tumor, Yao says. Islet cell tumors—which can be treated—are known to produce hormones that mimic diabetes or cause digestive problems. Those tumors can cause cachexia, the wasting syndrome seen in cancer patients, says Jeffrey Mechanick, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chair of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists’ nutrition committee. Technically, that might be considered a nutritional problem.
But given no further details, everyone is simply guessing at this point. “It’s a mystery, and it will stay a mystery until Mr. Jobs decides to make it known,” says Lustig.
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