Medical Treatments

As if a leukemia diagnosis wasn't enough, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had another internal battle on his hands. Whom should he tell? The intensely private Abdul-Jabbar found out last December that he had a rare form of leukemia, though he shared it with only the smallest of circles. He waited five months before telling Lakers Coach Phil Jackson that he had Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia, Jackson said Tuesday. The disease is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that produces cancerous blood cells.

A Los Angeles-based law organization Wednesday launched a program to provide free legal assistance to veterans who hit bureaucratic roadblocks when filing claims for federal medical and mental health benefits. Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm, will offer the free service throughout Southern California and, in partnership with other volunteer attorneys, in more than 25 states. "Many veterans who return home to their families are facing a system that routinely rejects their benefit claims," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a Veterans Day news conference to announce the effort.

Two Los Angeles City Council committees rejected the advice of the city attorney and voted Monday to approve an ordinance that allows marijuana dispensaries to continue to sell the drug to people with a doctor's recommendation. The city attorney's office has maintained for a year and a half that Los Angeles has no choice but to ban sales because state law and court decisions are clear that collectives can only cultivate marijuana.

Members of the Los Angeles City Council's planning committee delayed a decision on a new medical marijuana ordinance that would have created regulated collectives operating in city limits. The draft ordinance would have required each member of a medical marijuana collective to register under penalty of perjury with the city clerk's office, and required each collective to install an alarm system and a television surveillance system, and to store dried marijuana in a locked vault or safe.

It may soon be possible to distinguish aggressive prostate tumors requiring immediate treatment from those that grow slowly and can be safely ignored, a problem that has vexed oncologists and patients for decades. Looking at the complete profiles of chemicals produced by prostate tumors, researchers found that levels of sarcosine -- a simple derivative of the amino acid glycine -- are substantially higher in patients with aggressive tumors, they reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Some components of green tea may counteract the beneficial effects of a widely used anti-cancer agent called Velcade, also known as bortezomib. Dr. Axel Schonthal of the USC Keck School of Medicine and colleagues evaluated the impact of green tea compounds on the efficacy of bortezomib against multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. Bortezomib fights cancer by inducing tumor cell death. Schonthal and colleagues found that some of the green tea polyphenols and other components prevented bortezomib from killing tumor cells.

Patients suffering from obsessive, distressing thoughts have a new treatment option: a pacemaker-like device that relieves anxiety with electrical jolts to the brain. The Food and Drug Administration approved Medtronic's Reclaim Deep Brain Stimulator device, the first implant to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. Though about 2.2 million Americans have the disorder, the new device would be available only to a small group of patients who don't respond to other treatments. Shaped like a pacemaker, the Reclaim device is implanted under the skin of the chest and then connected to four electrodes in the brain.

A new formula that includes gene testing has proved much better at setting the ideal dose for the blood thinner warfarin than what doctors do now: Give a standard amount and adjust it by trial and error. The formula was tested in a large international study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. A new experiment will soon test the gene study's results in a more rigorous way. Most patients will probably have to wait at least a few years before genetic testing becomes a common factor in warfarin dosing.

The doctor wasted no time getting started. He took Ana's face in his hands and angled the left side up to the light. He squeezed and pushed the folds of skin on her chin, her cheek and forehead. He separated the eyelids to look at her eye. "Can you see anything?" "Yeah." He asked her to track his finger from left to right. "A little blurry?" "Yeah." He didn't usually work so fast, but he had been disoriented by this new patient. She was the last appointment at the end of a busy day, and he had misread the file.

For most patients with diabetes and clogged arteries who have not had a heart attack, treatment with drugs and lifestyle changes are as effective at reducing the risk of death as immediate bypass surgery or angioplasty, researchers said Sunday. For diabetics with a more severe form of heart disease requiring immediate surgery, bypass surgery is more effective than angioplasty at reducing risk of heart attacks and strokes, but not deaths, researchers reported at a meeting of the American Diabetes Assn.