NEWS

High-Profile Cancer Cases Prompt Awareness Efforts

Brian Vastag

On a recent Sunday, Green Bay Packers punter Louie Aguiar booted a 57-yard kick, to the delight of 60,000 football-drunk cheeseheads.



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Louie Aguiar

 
Aguiar must have been feeling good — not just for pinning the archrival Minnesota Vikings deep against their own end zone, but for overcoming testicular cancer just 18 months earlier.

In March 1998, Aguiar had been enjoying the off-season working on his ranch in Nevada when he injured his left testicle. He waited for the pain and swelling to subside, but through a week it persisted; his wife insisted he see a doctor. She made the appointment, and reluctantly Aguiar went.

Blood tests and an ultrasound confirmed the doctor's suspicion: Aguiar had early stage testicular cancer. His left testicle was removed and he began 15 radiation treatments. But like Barry Sanders on AstroTurf, Aguiar bounced back, returning to the ranch and the practice field a few months later. The short-term pain of the injury had transformed into long-term good fortune. (Note: There is no evidence that injuries cause testicular cancer, but injuries often bring men who happen to have tumors into doctors' offices.)

"I was lucky that we caught it early and got it taken care of," said Aguiar.

Thirty years ago, another football star wasn't as lucky. Brian Piccolo, who ran the ball for the Chicago Bears, died in 1970 at age 26 — at the height of his career. A book and movie about Piccolo and his friendship with legendary running back Gayle Sayers, both titled "Brian's Song," briefly threw the spotlight on testicular cancer.

And though the movie won praise — critic Leonard Maltin calls it "a milestone in excellence in made-for-TV movies" — pop culture's cycle of "hot and not" soon bumped the Piccolo drama from collective memory.

It wasn't until Lance Armstrong — another testicular cancer survivor who had lung and brain metastases — won the Tour de France this past July that the disease again received mass attention. In the intervening decades, though, oncologists had achieved something eminently elusive for other cancers: an impressive overall cure rate. (See previous article.)

"If Lance Armstrong had been diagnosed 25 years ago, instead of in 1996, there's no way he would have survived," said Larry Einhorn, M.D., distinguished professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, and Armstrong's physician. "This is one time when there was a huge leap forward [in cancer treatment]."

Part of this progress was bankrolled by the Brian Piccolo Foundation, established by Joy Piccolo O'Connell (Brian's wife) and friends. Between 1970 and 1992 the Foundation donated $2 million to testicular cancer research.

To return some of what they've been given, both Aguiar and Armstrong have set up their own funds. Aguiar's High-Five Foundation in Kansas City (where he wore No. 5 with his old team, the Chiefs), fosters cancer education and self-screening in Hispanic neighborhoods. So far, the foundation has raised $30,000 for those causes.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation provides grants to researchers studying testicular cancer, especially the after-effects of treatment, which include elevated risk for second cancers and infertility. Last year the foundation awarded grants to the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. With donations now "into the six-figure range," according to scientific adviser Steven Wolff, M.D., from Vanderbilt, the foundation will fund several of the 23 applications they have received this year.



             
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