Word: anemia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...abnormal life-style led to a deterioration of his health, which already had been weakened by earlier accidents and overwork. After the first 18 months of seclusion in the Desert Inn, Hughes had wasted to less than 100 Ibs. He developed chronic anemia in 1968; one of the Western world's two or three richest men suffered from malnutrition...
...youngster is the victim of severe aplastic anemia, a rare, puzzling disease in which the bone marrow loses its ability to produce three essential components of blood: the white cells that fight infection, the red cells that transport oxygen to the tissues, and platelets for clotting. Only by confining Teddy to the superclean room and giving him repeated transfusions have doctors managed to keep him alive...
...Aplastic anemia strikes about 1,000 people in the U.S. each year and kills 50% to 80% of them within a matter of months. Doctors do not know the ailment's causes; genetic factors, radiation, viruses and such chemicals as benzines have all been implicated. But whenever anyone survives, it is usually because his bone marrow suddenly-and mysteriously-begins working again. Teddy, who is the son of a prominent cancer specialist, Dr. Vincent DeVita Jr., director of the division of cancer treatment at NCI, has shown little improvement. His marrow remains almost as inactive today...
Doctors' Strategy. Though aplastic anemia is not a form of cancer, doctors at NCI were particularly interested in Teddy's case for what it might teach them about treating patients with leukemia and other types of cancer who develop aplastic anemia because of their anticancer therapy. The strategy of Teddy's doctors was to give him transfusions of red blood cells and platelets to keep him alive, plus hormones and other drugs to stimulate bone-marrow activity (it is impractical to inject patients regularly with normal white cells both because white cells ordinarily live only a short...
Teddy has done neither. Every sign of possible recovery has been quickly followed by a setback. To make matters worse, the chances of a successful bone-marrow transplant, a technique employed sometimes in aplastic anemia and occasionally in leukemia cases, faded when the likeliest donor, Teddy's sister Elizabeth, 9, turned out to have a distinctly different marrow type...