The Taipei Veterans General Hospital (TVGH) yesterday held an unveiling ceremony for its new Therapeutic and Research Center of Pancreatic Cancer, in which a 74-year-old patient talked about his “painless” experience undergoing heavy ion therapy to treat advanced pancreatic cancer.
The man, surnamed Lee (李), said that in February he started experiencing abdominal pain and losing weight in February. He visited a clinic, which said he had gastroesophageal reflux.
After five visits, the clinic referred him to TVGH, where he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which had invaded his superior mesenteric artery and vein.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
Learning that he had cancer, Lee said he became anxious and unhappy at the thought of the painful treatment and possibly having to leave his family behind.
He agreed to undergo a combination of chemotherapy and heavy ion therapy at the hospital, and found the latter to be painless.
Taiwan has a pancreatic cancer incidence rate of 4.64 per 100,000 men and 3.21 per 100,000 women, center director Shyr Yi-ming (石宜銘) said.
Pancreatic cancer is the seventh-leading cause of death by cancer in Taiwan, but what causes the disease remains unclear, Shyr said.
Pancreaticoduodenectomy, also known as the Whipple procedure, is the most common type of surgery performed to remove tumors in the pancreas, but as pancreatic cancer is not easy to detect, it is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, he said.
Surgery is also hard to perform on patients with Lee’s condition — locally advanced pancreatic cancer that has invaded the superior mesenteric artery and vein, he added.
However, after undergoing heavy ion therapy, Lee’s tumor, 4cm in diameter, shrank and was nearly invisible, allowing doctors to perform the Whipple procedure in June, Shyr said.
Lee’s CA19-9 serum level — a tumor marker to detect pancreatic cancer — dropped from 219 to 12.4U/mL, within the normal range of 0 to 27U/mL, he added.
Compared with conventional beam or proton therapy, heavy ion radiation can deliver a beam that is more precise and potent, and focused only on the cancer, which produces less side effects on normal tissues, involves no incision and thus no pain, making it suitable for elderly patients, he said.
For people with advanced pancreatic cancer, the combination of chemotherapy and heavy ion therapy can first help shrink the size of the tumor, allowing them to receive a Whipple procedure, raising their chances of survival, the hospital said.
TVGH superintendent Chen Wei-ming (陳威明) said that the cost of heavy ion therapy is relatively high and many might not be able to afford the treatment.
However, to help economically disadvantaged people, the hospital sets a quota each year to help them receive the treatment for free, Chen said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching