The Need to Know

Topic: gastric cancer, most hopeless of all cancers.

Theme: stomach and intestinal cancer now kill some 80,000 Americans each year, account for 45% of cancer deaths.

Question: what to do about it?

That was the grim problem that faced 125 of the nation's top gastric specialists last week at an extraordinary conference in Chicago. Their chairman, Dr. Andrew Conway Ivy of the University of Illinois Medical College, gravely suggested that the time had come for emergency action. Though gastric cancer is the deadliest, it is getting the least study. Some points: P: Gastric cancer gives no early warning, is usually unsuspected until too late. P:By the time they get to a doctor, only 8% of stomach-cancer victims can be successfully treated, 25% are beyond all help. P:The best protection is frequent X-ray examination of every citizen to detect cancers early, but the handful of U.S. cancer clinics already have six-month examination waiting lists.

If detected early, Dr. Ivy observed, stomach cancer is far from hopeless. An operation removing part or all of the stomach may prolong life five to ten years. But once a stomach cancer spreads to the liver, the patient is doomed; though man can do without a stomach, he cannot survive without a liver.

Through a day and a half of worried debate, the conferees gloomily dissected their topic, agreed chiefly on one thing: the need for more research. Some suggestions: movies of fluoroscope views of the stomach to determine whether fleeting stomach movements could be used to diagnose cancer, studies of possible relations between cancer and heredity, hormones, hydrochloric acid in the stomach.

Dr. Ivy's proposals: 1) let the U.S. launch a huge cancer education campaign, like those on syphilis and tuberculosis, 2) let Congress up its $500,000 ("drop in the bucket") appropriation for cancer research.

Cancer was also on the minds of U.S. radiologists (Xray specialists) as they also convened in Chicago last week. From Dr. Milton Friedman of New York University, late of the Army, they heard of the discovery of a fantastic result of cancer of the testes.

At Washington's Walter Reed Hospital, a young G.I. arrived from Guadalcanal with such a cancer. Dr. Friedman found, to his astonishment, that the soldier's sperm had become fertilized; by a kind of parthenogenesis (virgin birth), without female ova, the cancer had produced tumors resembling embryos, containing bits of placenta, lung, bone, etc.

Soon other cases turned up. Friedman treated them with the hospital's 1,000,000-volt X-ray machine, "Big Bertha," found that he could arrest their cancers if he adjusted the X-ray dose to the contents of the tumor, i.e., one dose for bone, another for lung, etc. All told, he treated 256 G.I.s with cancer of the testes, got a high percentage of improvement.

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