Alex Trebek wants to get back in the studio and start working again. Amazing.
Rejoice Jeopardy fans! While many of us may be disappointed that there’s no new episodes of the television game show due to COVID-19, everyone’s favorite host, Alex Trebek, isn’t letting his battle with pancreatic cancer stop him from looking towards the future, and revealed that he plans to return to the show once it’s safe to film again.
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Alex Trebek’s Battle With Cancer
Since his diagnosis in 2019, Trebek has been sharing encouraging health updates with fans, and treatment results have been promising. On the one-year anniversary diagnosis of Trebek’s disease, he announced that he was “beating the odds,” seeing as the one-year survival rate for stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients is 18%. Trebek also admitted that he had experience moments of depressing while going through chemotherapy treatments, and considered giving up at times.
“There were moments of great pain; days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned, and sudden massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on,” Trebek said. “But I brushed that aside quickly because that would have been a massive betrayal.”
Since Trebek is currently battling cancer, the sudden appearance of COVID-19 has put him at high risk of contracting the virus. However, Ruth Lee, a close family friend of the Trebeks, told Closer Weekly that Trebek is "managing quite well" during the outbreak and is spending his time fixing things around the house and reading.
Navigating A Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis
Detecting pancreatic cancer early can be a key way to help patients through treatment. The disease has a five year survival rate of just nine percent, it's vital that it's caught as early as possible. Nearly 57,000 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. Although pancreatic cancer survival rates have been improving for decades, it's still considered to be largely incurable. An exception to this is if the tumor is still small enough and localized enough to be operated on. As most pancreatic cancers are particularly aggressive and progress rapidly, catching it early is critical. The more aggressive the cancer is, the less treatment options are available.
Dr. Anirban Maitra explains why catching pancreatic cancer is crucial.
Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult type of cancer to treat, and while some of it is due to it being diagnosed in late stages, treatment in general can be unresponsive. This is because of the stroma which is surrounded by cancer cells and is often resistant to medication, chemotherapy, and radiation. Since it serves as a barrier against treatment, it's more difficult to kill cancer cells in the body.
"Think of pancreatic cancer as an oatmeal raisin cookie and the raisins are actually the cancer cells, and the cookie part is actually all the stroma around it," says. Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center. "And imagine having to navigate through all that stroma for a treatment to be able to get into a cell to kill it. So that's why the treatments just really aren't good enough to penetrate the cancer. But we're improving, we're getting better treatments."
Dr. Allyson Ocean explains why pancreatic cancer is difficult to treat
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