Cancer connection: Screening gets star power

When celebrities reveal personal brushes with cancer, their stories have an impact on screening and prevention.

By Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli, AMNews correspondent. April 16, 2007.

When a celebrity appears on the morning news saying, "I have cancer," it stops breakfast. The viewing public grieves alongside this trusted friend. And listening to details of the celebrity's diagnosis, struggle and, sometimes, even mortality, can lead viewers to search for clues to their own survival. What treatments did that famous person seek? How did the public figure find out? Did the person smoke? What did the celebrity eat? What is he or she eating now? And it is in this moment of shared intimacy that the onlookers feel a bit fragile, even vulnerable, wondering if they might be next.

"The announcement that Dana Reeve had lung cancer just two days after Peter Jennings died from it had many Americans wondering if they should get tested with a CT scan," says Steven Woloshin, MD, research associate with the VA Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt., and associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

This example is only one of many.

When former first lady Betty Ford talked publicly about her radical mastectomy in 1974, women followed her urgings to talk to their doctors about mammography.

"Detection rates rose dramatically in a phenomenon known as the Betty Ford blip," says Barron H. Lerner, MD, associate professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University in New York and author of the forthcoming book, When Illness Goes Public. "Celebrity says pay attention."

Personal accounts followed by big-name endorsements of cancer screening are increasingly common. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani urged men to get screened for prostate cancer after his diagnosis, as did former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell and retired U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. Melissa Etheridge boldly performed bald at the 2005 Grammy Awards -- a result of chemotherapy she received for breast cancer treatment -- giving women and men reason to applaud her courage and galvanizing those already enduring this side effect.