When thousands of racers line up at the Veterans Affairs grounds in West Los Angeles on Oct. 26, it will be to raise awareness for a devastating type of cancer sometimes linked to mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that are more prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews.
My patient, an esteemed rabbi, underwent major abdominal surgery lasting several hours. Within one day postoperatively, he was instructed to blow into a mechanical device to help prevent respiratory complications.
As a result of an automobile accident in 2007, Southern California resident Stephen Wilson was only able to enjoy the outdoors from a seated position in his wheelchair for years.
All women of Ashkenazi descent should be screened from age 30 for the BRCA gene mutation that causes breast cancer, an Israeli study recommends.
Historically, women have been under-represented in clinical trials.
As a gynecologic oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the late 1980s, Dr. Beth Karlan and her colleagues noticed that cancer seems to cluster in certain families. In 1991, they established the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program to investigate the role heredity plays in cancer.
In 2002, Los Angeles native Ronnel Conn was an undergraduate at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. When he heard there would be a bone marrow donor drive at the campus Hillel for a D.C. local in need, he showed up and got his cheek swabbed, because, he said, “It seemed like the right thing to do.”
More than a decade ago, Silviu Itescu and Michael Schuster were conducting research in a laboratory at Columbia University and made a discovery involving a type of human stem cell that could be used to treat rats during a heart attack.
Only 18 days after joining together in a hopeful prayer vigil for three Israeli teenage boys abducted at a bus stop outside their school, 1,500 members of the Los Angeles Jewish community grieved together in a memorial service for the teens—Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Frenkel—whose bodies were found on June 30 in a field north of Hebron.
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