Healthcare

Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder who also figures behind the success of iPhone and iPad, died at age 56 after suffering pancreatic cancer.

Steve Job has previously withdrawn from the post of Apple’s CEO. Before resigning, Jobs has been ‘on leave’ from his work at Apple, because he has to undergo liver transplantation for his pancreatic cancer.

However, the success of liver transplant does not guarantee the patient survived from the disease, although the liver has been replaced.
Apart from surgery complications, often the cancer cells has spread to other organs.

Some of complications of liver transplantation including:

- High risk of infection
- Bleeding caused by the inability of new liver produces blood-clotting proteins.
- Clots in major blood vessels that supply blood to the liver.
- Rejection of transplanted liver (not accepted by the body).

Steve Job includes patients who have rarely pancreatic cancer.
Jobs had pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor that affects only 5% of the 43,000 cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year.

Pancreatic cancer has a small portion of all cancer cases in the United States. However, the disease is highly lethal because it is usually detected when entering an advanced stage that requires very complicated and complex of medical treatments.

For many years against his illness, Jobs has done a variety of aggressive therapy, including liver transplantation.
Compared with other pancreatic cancer patients, the survival rate of Jobs is high.

Zev Wainberg, digestive organ cancer experts from the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center said before Jobs died on August, “It is difficult to determine how long it can last for Jobs, but I suspect no more than a year,” as quoted by USA Today.

However, Margaret Tompero, pancreati cancer experts from the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved treating Jobs said, “pancreatic cancer patients usually survive less than a year, but Job’s cancer usually more easily treated.”

According to Tompero, nueroendocrine tumors arising in hormone-producing cells of the pancreas, usually grow slowly, so the patients can live more than two years. If the tumor is still there, usually the cancer will grow faster.

Whatever the analysis and actions taken to Jobs, the figures behind the successful of iPod and iPad has given a lesson for us to be vigilant against the risk of cancer, although the percentage of occurrence is very small.

Goodbye Jobs, your work is very rewarding for many people.