Tom Aronson is an advocate for pancreatic cancer patients | diabetes | pancreatic cancer screening
- Bruce Morton
- Apr 15, 2021
- 14 min read
DESCRIPTION
Tom Aronson became a caregiver when his father’s annual eye exam revealed his father had diabetes. About a year later, a number of additional symptoms materialized, and Tom received a call from his dad, saying his dad had pancreatic cancer. Nine months after the diagnosis, Tom’s father passed away. Tom later learned that studies are underway seeking to determine if there is a connection between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Going forward, through the Early Detection Initiative, people diagnosed with a diabetes, will be screened to see if they have any type of cancer.
Tom Aronson of Santa Monica, California, long thought his father, Bob, was the picture of health. He was 6’5” and in great shape. Then at age 54, Bob went in for an annual eye exam, which led to a diagnosis of diabetes. This came as a surprise to Bob and his family because the Aranson family had no history of diabetes. Within a year, for Bob Aronson, things went from bad to worse.
Bob Aronson began to feel pain in his chest and abdomen. After a few visits to doctors and specialists, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nine months later, he passed away. Tom and his family were left to wonder how diabetes could have led to pancreatic cancer.
Tom did some research, which led him to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, or PanCAN. That research resulted in his quest to learn how pancreatic cancer can be detected at an early stage. Due to the lack of pancreatic cancer screening, most of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed Stage IV, in which the five-year survival rate is less than five percent. However, in the rare instances in which pancreatic cancer is found at an earlier stage, the five-year survival rate is above 80 percent.
Thanks to fundraising started by Tom, a $200,000 grant from PanCAN, research aimed at increased early detection of pancreatic cancer was spearheaded by Dr. Anirban Maitra at MD Anderson in Texas. That research grew into an initiative announced by PanCAN, called the Early Detection Initiative, which is about further testing of people diagnosed with diabetes later in life, to see if the diagnosis is accompanied by cancer symptoms.
Tom Aronson says it is becoming common knowledge that is a connection between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. In contrast, when Bob Aronson was diagnosed with diabetes, the eye doctor had no inclination that Bob could have had pancreatic cancer. Tom wants to believe if his dad had been diagnosed with diabetes years later, the pancreatic cancer would have been detected at an earlier stage, giving him an increased chance for survivorship.
While Tom Aronson is pleased to see the results of the Early Detection Initiative, he admits these days it is still difficult for one to get a pancreatic cancer screening. He hopes with the passage of time, improvements will be made in this area as well.
Additional Resources:
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network
Dr. Anirban Maitra, MD Anderson
TRANSCRIPT
Bruce Morton: Greetings, and welcome to the @CancerInterviews podcast. I’m your host, Bruce Morton, and on this segment, we have a most unusual guest. He is Tom Aronson of Santa Monica, California. Tom has never been diagnosed with cancer, but make no mistake, he was, is and will be on a cancer journey. It began with his being a caregiver for his father, and from there it went to a potentially exciting medical discovery, and from there, it went to Tom being an advocate and a fundraiser. There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s start unpacking. Tom, welcome to Cancer Interviews.
Tom Aronson: Thanks for having me, Bruce. I look forward to having a chance to talk to you.
BM: What we like to do at first is learn a little bit more about you, exclusive of your cancer journey, like where you are from, what you do for work, and even though it seems as though your plate is quite full, what you with your leisure time when you have leisure time, stuff like that.
TA: I am from Santa Monica. I have got two wonderful kids, a son in first grade and a daughter who just started preschool, and we are spending a lot of quality time together, given the pandemic. It is exciting now that we can do a little bit more. We like to spend a lot of time outside, excited to go back to some baseball games, maybe play some golf, but mostly just spending time with the family and hopefully traveling a little bit more. In my day job, I work in marketing for Disney theme parks, so I am also excited about going back to Disneyland.
BM: You mentioned baseball games. If you live in Santa Monica, that sounds like Dodger territory, but you work for Disney, which is in Angel territory, so are you a Dodger fan or an Angel fan?
TA: I am an Angel fan, although living in Dodger country. My dad, who we will definitely spend a lot more time talking about, had some really interesting connections. He worked in construction and became friendly with the Autrys, who used to own the Angels. So, ever since I was a little boy, we ended up going to Angel games and I am raising my son an Angel fan, but there is plenty of love for the Dodgers, too.
BM: Your journey began with your being a caregiver for your dad pertaining to diabetes and not cancer. What all did that entail?
TA: My dad was very healthy. He was a giant, figuratively and literally, he was 6’5”. He wasn’t overweight, he was in great shape, so it was really a surprise when at about age 54, he was diagnosed with diabetes. He went in for just a normal annual eye exam, and the doctor suspected my dad had diabetes. It was strange at the time because there was no family history of diabetes. Nothing to expect that this would pop up. We didn’t know it at the time, but that was really the start of our journey with pancreatic cancer.
BM: So, how did your dad get from Point ‘A’ to Point ‘B’, in which first he had been diagnosed with diabetes, then he learned he had cancer.
TA: There really wasn’t that long of a time between diagnoses. It was about a year, and a year later, he had a bunch of other symptoms. He had pain in his abdomen and chest and after a couple visits to doctors and different specialists, it was diagnosed that he had pancreatic cancer. I still remember that phone call. I was studying, getting my MBA at UCLA, he called, and I went outside one of my classrooms and stood on one of the balconies and he explained to me what was going on. That was the first of many conversations that we had, and that was the beginning of a lot of questions, like how did this happen, were there things that we could have seen in the past, is there anything that we could have done to help change the ultimate course, the ultimate outcome. He passed away nine months after that diagnosis.
BM: Diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Quite obviously, your dad had a lot to deal with, but as a caregiver, did you have a plan?
TA: There was no plan. He had so many people around him, family, his wonderful fiancé, my brother and others, but when you get that kind of diagnosis, you know, I am his son, so it definitely impacts me greatly, but I can’t even figure the way it impacted him; but it is very scary, it is such a rare cancer, and there are no really great outcomes, especially when it is diagnosed so late. The majority of pancreatic cancer is diagnosed at Stage IV, and what I would tell all of my friends and people who asked, there are only four stages. So, that’s why it is so critical to figure out how we can find early detection signals. We didn’t know what to do, and we wanted to make sure we had the best care possible. You go to your personal networks. My dad was actually pretty close friends with somebody pretty senior at Cedar Sinai Hospital (in Los Angeles) at the time and he helped put together the care plan. We did a bunch of Googling, we learned about the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network very early on, which has done amazing work. We have become very close and have become huge supporters of theirs and have tried to do everything that we could. Ultimately it came to a point in which we wanted to make him as comfortable as possible as he can be, given his facing a terminal outcome.
BM: Tom, what is turning out to be a chain of events that could help many people in terms of their journey with pancreatic cancer began with a newsletter from the aforementioned Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. If you would, explain that chain of events.
TA: When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we started asking the question, ‘How is the diabetes related?” “Is it possible the diabetes was a symptom of a pancreatic cancer tumor?” If that’s the case, man, it would have been wonderful to know that and wonderful to take some course of action. Pancreatic cancer is such a deadly disease because it is not discovered until Stage IV, and so the five-year survival rate is less than five percent; but if there is a way to get to it early, to an earlier stage, the five-year survival rate is over 80 percent. There is huge hope for better outcomes if we can find better ways to find this cancer earlier on. I and my family and friends had suspected that that diagnosis of diabetes was a seminal moment and if there was more that we could have done at that point in time, then there could have been a better outcome. Like I said, we had become involved with PanCAN (the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network) and get their e-mails and mailers, and maybe it was around 2013, I got a newsletter from them that outlined the scientific grants that they were funding that year. One of them was specifically on this topic. It was specifically about trying to determine if late onset diabetes is a symptom of pancreatic cancer. I called my brother up and said the content of this newsletter is exactly what happened with our dad. I then reached out to my friend, Pam, who actually started PanCAN, and said I would love to be able to donate to this. Can I donate money that would directly go to this grant? Pam is just a wonderful, wonderful woman and a visionary. We had lunch and she said I can absolutely donate to it, but if you raise the money, we can name the grant in honor of your dad. I thought, what an amazing honor that would be. At the same time, we didn’t have $200,000 laying around, but we decided to give it a shot. We started a crowdfunding campaign, we reached out to our friends, our family, our employers had very wonderful matching programs. We were able to raise the funds, and we were able to name the grant after our dad, Bob Aronson. That body of work was led by Anirban Maitra, who is just an amazing human, an amazing scientist and doctor and investigator and he led that work. He is at MD Anderson in Texas, and he is leading so much around the areas of early detection, and that ended up being kind of a seed that has grown into this amazing initiative that PanCAN announced, called the Early Detection Initiative, which is about further testing to people who get diagnosed with diabetes later in life, who have any cancer symptoms and kind of surprised they would have diabetes.
BM: Tom, I am guessing there are people who are listening or watching that are going to be intrigued by what you have told us. If they would like to take the ball and run with the quest for more information on this, what are your suggestions as to where they should go?
TA: The first place is to check out the PanCAN website, and check out the Early Detection Initiative, and see how it works and what we are hoping for there.
BM: And where PanCan is concerned, their web address is very easy to remember. It is very simply pancan.org. That can be your starting point. Now, if they get information and they get it in a timely fashion, how can they benefit if they get information and they get it ‘in time’ to avoid a Stage IV diagnosis?
TA: It is now becoming common knowledge that there is a connection between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. So, when my dad was diagnosed, the eye doctor had no inclination that my dad could have pancreatic cancer. Now I truly believe that eight years later, if my father were diagnosed with diabetes, presented the same symptoms and the same health condition, then the doctor, whoever diagnosed him would have said, ‘You know what? I think we should dig deeper here.’ So much work has been done that people now understand this connection and even general practitioners understand this connection. My hope is that pancreatic cancer doesn’t go undetected and combined with all this additional work that has happened in all these trials that PanCAN is helping to lead that there will be more advancements and screening that can help get us to earlier detections so that it is not Stage IV, and it is in a place where the tumor can more easily be treated and removed and outcomes for patients will be much more improved. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where pancreatic cancer is not a terminal disease.
BM: Let me ask you this because you mentioned the ‘S’ word, as in screening. I can tell you from my experience with Cancer Interviews that the accessibility to screening varies widely, depending upon which type of cancer with which you have been diagnosed. So, knowing what you know, if you had to rate accessibility for pancreatic cancer screening on a scale of one to ten, what rating would it get?
TA: I couldn’t give you a scientific answer to that, but I can tell you there is no specific screening method at present. I go every year, I get my annual physical, my doctor is well aware of my family history, my father passing away of pancreatic cancer. Every year, I ask the same question: What can we do to screen for pancreatic cancer? Every year, the answer is the same, and that is that unfortunately, there is nothing. That’s why the work that PanCAN is doing in collaboration with a bunch of different institutions across the world, and elite scientists, is going to get us to a much better place. I will also say as another plug for PanCAN, once we got past the terrible fate of what happened with our dad and got to the place where I really wanted to learn and wanted to see what I could do to help more, one of the stumbling blocks I ran into was the problem of competition versus collaboration. In other words, the little research that I would do, I would see all these different scientific institutions and different universities were all fighting against each other to come up with that next innovation, and you just know that is not going to be the winning method. So, how can an institution come along and bring people together and leverage all of the experts in a more collaborative way, and that is exactly what I learned is what PanCAN is doing. It is not about a particular institution or a particular researcher, it really is about plugging in all those collective skills into this larger network, so that they can get more data, they can get better results, and then ultimately the findings that can be distributed a lot quicker because everyone is really in it for the same reasons, not for trying to win the prize, if you will, for a particular institution, so that was something that made me feel very optimistic about where we can go and what PanCAN is doing.
BM: Tom, for health care professionals to ramp up what they know about the diabetes-pancreatic cancer connection, that requires research and research requires money. What are you doing to help in this area, and what can others do?
TA: What I am trying to do is donate as much as I can. I look at the different organizations that are helping to advance science and research into pancreatic cancer. PanCAN is definitely one of them, MD Anderson is another one, Dr. Maitra is leading the Pancreatic Cancer Moonshot Program over there. The more I have learned about MD Anderson over the years is really impressive, and a bunch of other organizations are helping pancreatic cancer as well, so a little donation can go a long way.
BM: This may be redundant, as these two ventures may cross-pollinate, but we have established that you work as a fundraiser, and you work as an advocate. What goes into your being an advocate in the fight against pancreatic cancer?
TA: I think it is more rewarding to kind of share anything that I may find out that may interest me. That is one of the good things about social media. Being able to amplify good stories and good outcomes is something that I have enjoyed. I think it started when we were crowdfunding for the research in our dad’s name. That first time you go out on Facebook, and you ask your friends and family for money, it is a very vulnerable moment. I think it is one of the last things somebody wants to do is ask people for money; but one of the things that came out of it that I was not expecting was hearing from so many other friends and family and colleagues who had been impacted just like myself and my family by pancreatic cancer, resulting in losing loved ones. It helps grow that community, which again, is not a community anyone chose to be a part of, or that you would like to be a part of.
BM: Exclusive of PanCAN, is there any fundraising you do?
TA: Each year on November 28, the anniversary of my dad’s death, we do a fundraiser. It started when Facebook trotted out the fundraiser tool. This past year we raised $5,000. We also encourage anyone to experiment with that tool. It is a great way to get the word out and to raise funds in a quick and efficient manner.
BM: Tom, we are going to bring this to a conclusion, and when we do so, we like to ask our guests the same question. Specifically, if you encountered a friend, colleague or stranger who had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer or thinks they might be so diagnosed and you had a private audience with this person, what would be your message?
TA: There would be two things. The first would be to call MD Anderson and try to figure out a care plan. The more I have learned about how they holistically treat cancer patients, the more convinced I am that that is a great first place to start. That second phone call would be to PanCAN. They have an amazing patient advocate group, and again, they are on the forefront of all the clinical trails. So, I think it is very important to get involved and we can all collectively do our part to create better outcomes for the next wave of individuals who are unfortunately diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
BM: Outstanding. Tom, thanks so much for a wealth of great information and we both know how devastating pancreatic cancer can be, so I am hoping what you have had to say can help a number of people so that if they are diagnosed, they are not diagnosed Stage IV. Tom, thanks so much for being with us.
TA: Thank you, Bruce.
BM: And that’s going to wrap up this segment of Cancer Interviews. We hope that what you heard can aid the cancer journey for yourself or a loved one. So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.
Resources…
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network
PanCAN Early Detection Initiative Webinar
Dr. Anirban Maitra, MD Anderson
Robert Aronson Grant Information
SHOW NOTES
TITLE: Tom Aronson, Pancreatic Cancer Advocate – Santa Monica, California, USA
Tom Aronson was never diagnosed with cancer, but he embarked on his own cancer journey when his father, Bob, was diagnosed first with diabetes, then with pancreatic cancer. By then, Bob Aronson’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis was Stage Four.
Although pancreatic cancer took his father’s life, Tom tried to find answers as to whether a connection existed between diabetes and pancreatic cancer, and if learning more about such a connection can result in earlier detection of pancreatic cancer.
His digging led him to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and a leader in the field, Dr. Anirban Maitra of MD Anderson Cancer Center. Both are vigorously spearheading research aimed at pancreatic cancer early detection.
Additional Resources:
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network
PanCAN Early Detection Initiative Webinar
Dr. Anirban Maitra, MD Anderson
Time Stamps:
03:20 Tom’s dad, Bob, began his journey with pancreatic cancer with a diabetes diagnosis.
04:30 Soon after came Bob Aronson’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
07:56 Tom sought information from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to determine if there is a connection between diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
09:11 Research into this connection was led by Dr. Anirban Maitra of MD Anderson.
13:03 What has been learned about the connection between diabetes and pancreatic cancer, which can lead to earlier detection of pancreatic cancer.
15:56 Unfortunately it is still difficult to get a pancreatic cancer screening.
KEYWORDS (tags):
pancreatic cancer
early detection initiative
cancer interviews
pancreatic cancer moonshot program
anirban maitra
Comments