JFK Baby Death 50 Years Ago Sparked Race to Save Preemies

Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, born premature, died after 39 hours of life on Aug. 7, 1963, three months before his father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.

Though the baby was a healthy weight, he developed what was known then as hyaline membrane disease, a condition that killed about 25,000 children a year. At the time, the first family had Caroline, 5, and John Jr., 2, but Jacqueline Kennedy had previously had a miscarriage and a stillborn daughter.

The death of the presidential baby a half a century ago today was a critical event, according to historians, one that sparked medical advances that did for the survival of preemies what Sputnik did for the space race.

Was the Kennedy assassination an inside job?

That same year, a Canadian doctor had pioneered the controversial use of a ventilator and saved a similarly sick 34-week-old baby, but American doctors couldn't do the same for the Kennedy baby.

"The president was pretty embarrassed about that," said Dr. Jay Greenspan, chief of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson Medical College and Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children, where today about 95 percent of all infants diagnosed with what is now known as respiratory distress syndrome survive.

"We have come a long way," said Greenspan. "It was so tragic that the family went though this -- and you wish you could have been there. It was a simple fix. … The baby was really just slightly premature. He would be sort of an afterthought now in the after-care nursery."

Today, respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS, affects more than 16,000 premature infants in the United States each year, according to the March of Dimes. Babies with the condition have immature lungs that lack the protein surfactant that keeps their small air sacs from collapsing.

But it was the presidential spotlight that would ultimately transform the field, giving birth to neonatology and the modern neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.

Early births can lead to academic problems.

The Kennedy baby's death put a new focus on diseases of the newborn and resulted in increased funding for research by the National Institutes of Health, according to Dr. Suhas M. Nafday, director of Newborn Services at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

"This event energized the neonatal researchers into action to look for an effective management of RDS," he said.

Millions of babies worldwide have been saved, largely because of the efforts to improve the first infant ventilators and the discovery of surfactant a decade later.

Patrick was born at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod at about 37 weeks, weighing 4 pounds, 10? ounces, according to a recent account in The New York Times. As the infant's respiratory distress worsened, he was airlifted to Children's Hospital in Boston, where he was put in a hyperbaric chamber, used mostly for burn victims and divers with the bends or decompression sickness. At the time, Children's was using it for "blue babies," infants born with congenital heart defects that starve their bodies of oxygen and cause a bluish coloration of the skin.

"[Hyperbaric chambers] allowed for a higher oxygen content in their blood, but their lungs were collapsing," said Greenspan.

And oxygen carried risks, such as blindness. Pop singer Stevie Wonder, born six weeks premature, developed retinopathy while in an incubator because of excess oxygen. "We have now learned to control that," he said.

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Charting Death: Radio Host Breaks Old Barriers

Radio host Scott Simon never intended to tweet his mother's final hours to 1.2 million followers, but her dying moments were among the most emotional in his public life.

"I have covered 10 wars and been around the world," Simon told ABCNews.com. "But I am telling you, the 48 hours we stayed up together was one of the most exhilarating in my life. And she was also, for the benefit of her family, giving a really great performance, and no less sincere, rallying herself to be strong to relieve our anxieties."

For the past two weeks, Simon, of NPR's "Saturday Weekend Edition," has been tweeting about the looming death of his 84-year-old mother, a former "show girl" who died just short of her 85th birthday in Chicago of undetermined causes.

His tweets -- beginning July 16 when he learned about her emergency surgery to her death July 29 -- resonated around the world and drew praise from those who had similarly experienced the death of a loved one.

From the ICU at Northwestern University Memorial Hospital, he tweeted until the "Heart rate dropping. Heart dropping" moment, sharing his 140-character view of life's final journey.

Simon, 61, told ABCNews.com that he hadn't intended to tweet about his mother's death during the many monotonous moments in the ICU.

"I didn't expect it to be my mother's death bed," he said through tears. "It wasn't my frame of mind. I felt it could be the end, but I had one big reason to fight like a lion for her. ...I am her son and we were going to beat this together.

"I don't want people thinking I was holding my mother in my arms and tweeting. [As in] war, there are often seconds of panic and anxiety and terror between hours of tedium."

As Simon put it so emotionally over Twitter: "The heavens over Chicago have opened up and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped on stage."

Ethicists have taken note.

"This is the tip of a very big iceberg shift in thinking about privacy and intimate moments, when someone that prominent does that," said Art Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Parents suffer wrongful deaths in assisted living.

"It's not that he should or shouldn't do it; that's for him to decide and discuss with his mom and other relatives," he said. "But it's clear to me that one of the last places -- sex, birthing and dying -- are not off limits anymore. There aren't many spheres left, and that's a really notable shift."

Simon said his mother may not have understood what Twitter was, but she told her son after learning of the millions around the world who had tweeted him in support, "How very nice of them."

He said he was not grieving until the end. "Not only had we kept hoping, we did until her last breath," he said.

Simon described holding his mother's hand: "Haven't held it like this since I was 9." And shares her pain: "Will this go on forever?"

He jokes about one of the "great little things in life" is flossing her teeth. Then he tears up when his mother reacts to the birth of the royal baby.

"She had so many flabbergastingly insightful and funny things to say: 'Look baby, I tell you all great death-bed speeches are written in advance.' She was hilarious."

Newman had been a model -- the Jon James hair spray girl -- and did television commericals. Simon said he got his own in the public eye appearing with her in an advertisement for Archway cookies when he was about 8.

"She had lied about her age to work nightclubs to work at 16," he said. "My dad, Ernie Simon, was a comedian."

And one of the last goodbyes: "Mother cries Help Me at 2:30. Been holding her like a baby since. She's asleep now. All I can do is hold on to her."

Simon also tweets about the difficulty of delivering the sad news to his daughters Elise, 10, and Lina, 6: "Worst: telling our daughters. Oldest was flinty, youngest sobbed."

Easing the fear of death by writing suicide notes.

Meanwhile, Simon's heartfelt messages have gone viral, encouraging strangers to respond and share in his grief.

One follower, Steve McLaughlin, tweeted, "I haven't held my mother's hand in a long time, thank you for reminding me that time is fleeting and that I need to do that."

Other public figures have shared similar moments, but not in real time on the Internet. In 2004, the photographer Annie Leibovitz documented the death of her partner, writer Susan Sontag. Her son later called the photos, "carnival images of celebrity death."

"Social media has changed the way many people do lots of things," said Dr. Stuart Youngner, the Bioethics Department chairman at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. "Why not grieving? Scott Simon is a public figure and may well find that pubic expression of what many consider private feelings is helpful to him."

"After all," he adds. "Eric Clapton wrote a song about his young son who fell and died from an open window."

Philadelphia psychologist Ann Rosen Spector agrees that social media are "just a fact of life now."

But when it comes to grieving, sharing can be helpful, "as long as people don't feel pressured into doing it," she said. "Some people share every time they buy a new pair of shoes or sneeze or cough. Some people share medical updates. It's a whole new world. There is not a standard of care to grieve."

Kenneth Doka, a senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America and author of "Beyond Kubler-Ross: New Perspectives on Death, Dying and Grief," calls the support system that Twitter created around Simon "an incredible phenomenon."

But he said he was "curious" why Simon's mother was in so much pain, given scientific and medical advances in hospice care. "I wondered if we did all we could for this woman in pain," said Doka, who's also a professor of gerontology at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle in New York.

Simon said his mother had received morphine for her pain in the end. "Those people were ICU heroes," he said. "I am grateful to them and my family owes then a permanent debt."

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Petting Zoo Sued Over Boy's E.Coli Death

A 2-year-old boy died from an E. coli bacterial infection that he, along with 106 other people, caught after visiting a petting zoo at a county fair, a lawsuit claims.

Hunter "Gage" LeFevers died last October, nearly two weeks after visiting the petting zoo at the Cleveland County Fair in North Carolina, which was owned and operated by the Tennessee-based Circle G Ranch: Wild Animal Park, and Camel Safari.

According to court documents, the boy pet several animals and touched straw bedding while in the petting zoo and later touched the ground and other surfaces that were contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7.

E. coli bacteria is common and generally harmless, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that this particular strain, often spread by infected farm animal feces, causes serious gastrointestinal symptoms including bloody diarrhea in 5 percent to 10 percent of people who come in contact with it. Up to 5 percent of those who become severely ill -- about 60 people a year -- die from the infection.

In the complaint, Joshua and Jessica LeFevers say their son was supervised at all times and they followed all instructions given to them by employees and posted on signs. When they exited the zoo, they attempted to wash the boy's hands but the washing station was out of soap, according to the complaint.

Fecal Germs in Public Pools: Should You Worry?

After the boy fell ill, his parents took him to the hospital, they say in the complaint. Although he had bloody diarrhea, he wasn't admitted until he was taken to a pediatric clinic several days later, the complaint says. From there he was admitted to a second hospital where he was diagnosed with E. coli 0157:H7 infection and hemolytic uremic syndrome, a condition that predominantly strikes children and leads to anemia and kidney failure, according to the complaint.

"Gage LeFevers received intensive medical treatment including dialysis over the next several days in the Intensive Care Unit at Levine Children's Hospital," his parents say in the complaint.

Despite treatment, the boy died a few days later.

This isn't the first time North Carolina has had an E. coli outbreak caused by a contaminated petting zoo. In 2004, 108 visitors to the North Carolina State Fair reported getting sick from an E. coli 0157:H7 infection that was later traced back to the fair's petting zoo. The following year, the state passed "Aedin's Law" in honor of 2-year-old Aedin Grey who fell ill during the outbreak.

The law mandates all petting zoos operating in the state provide soap-and-water hand washing stations within 10 feet of the exit, signage warning of the potential risk of animal contact, and fences separating humans from animal pens. It also bars visitors from bringing food, drinks, baby bottles or pacifiers into animal pens.

8 Germiest Public Places

Speaking on behalf of the LeFevers, their attorney, Fred Pritzker, said the fair and petting zoo failed to follow the law and didn't do enough to protect patrons, including his clients. He said that among other infractions, they didn't provide adequate hand washing stations, properly dispose of animal waste or take adequate measures to control feces contamination to other parts of the fairgrounds through rain runoff.

O. Max Gardner, III, the attorney for The Cleveland County Fair said in an email statement to ABC that the fair's animal contact exhibits were fully inspected by state and local health agencies and found to be in full compliance with all applicable laws. He said that the fair also went above and beyond what they were legally required to do, placing signage and hand-washing stations in areas not required under Aedin's law.

"Despite this level of compliance by the Fair, this outbreak demonstrates that outbreaks may occur even when thorough control measures have been implemented," he said in the statement.

Gardner also said that the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and the Cleveland County Health Department initiated a comprehensive review of Fair activities and determined the source of the E. coli outbreak was the Circle G Ranch petting zoo.

David Hood, lawyer for the Circle G Ranch, responded in a statement saying in part, "…. The Circle G Ranch followed all the regulations spelled out under state law, and the state investigator agreed with that conclusion. The Ranch did not screw up and cause the problem."

The public health investigation determined that the petting zoo was the source of the deadly E. coli and that it likely spread to seating areas and the parking lot of the fair due to heavy rains. However, Julie Henry, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, said the purpose of the report was "not to assign blame, but to determine the source of the outbreak and how to prevent it from happening again."

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Vegetable Fats Reduce Prostate Cancer Death Risk

Editor's Choice
Academic Journal
Main Category: Prostate / Prostate Cancer
Also Included In: Nutrition / Diet;??Cancer / Oncology;??Neurology / Neuroscience
Article Date: 11 Jun 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Vegetable Fats Reduce Prostate Cancer Death Risk

Prostate cancer patients who replace animal fats and some carbohydrates with vegetable fats have a lower risk of premature death, researchers from the University of California reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

In the United States alone, nearly 2.5 million men currently live with prostate cancer. Not much is known about how diet may influence prostate cancer progression and death rates, the authors wrote as background information.

Erin L. Richman, Sc.D., and team carried out a study involving 4,577 men from the Health Professional Follow-up Study with non-metastatic prostate cancer between 1986 and 2010. They focused on the patients' dietary fat intake after diagnosis. Every four years, they completed questionnaires which asked how often they ate and drank over 130 different types of foods and drinks.

Over a follow-up period of 8.4 years, 315 men died from prostate cancer and 1,064 died from any cause. Those who replaced 10% of their dietary calorific intake of carbohydrates with vegetable fat had a 29% lower risk of lethal prostate cancer and a 26% lower risk of death from any cause.

The authors wrote:

"In this prospective analysis, vegetable fat intake after diagnosis was associated with a lower risk of lethal prostate cancer and all-cause mortality."

The results of this study go against what many doctors advise their recently diagnosed prostate cancer patients to do, which is "Cut out all fats from your diet". The right advice appears to be to tell the patient to consume more fat, fewer carbohydrates, and to make sure the fats come from plants and not animals.

The authors concluded:

"Overall, our findings support counseling men with prostate cancer to follow a heart-healthy diet in which carbohydrate calories are replaced with unsaturated oils and nuts to reduce the risk of all-cause mortality. ... The potential benefit of vegetable fat consumption for prostate cancer-specific outcomes merits further research."

Dr. Stephen J. Freedland, from Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina wrote in an invited Commentary:

"Using data from food frequency questionnaires completed every four years during follow-up, they found that men who consumed more vegetable fat had a lower risk of prostate cancer death.

Thus, in the absence of randomized trial data, it is impossible to use these data as 'proof' that vegetable intake lowers prostate cancer risk, and the authors have carefully avoided such statements.

Dr. Freedland says that the only modifiable risk factor associated with prostate cancer death risk is obesity. In other words, if you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, make sure you don't become obese, and if you are, lose weight.

How to avoid becoming or remaining obese remains unclear, although Richman and team's study suggests that switching from animal fats and some carbohydrates to vegetable fats may have some benefit.

Freedland concluded that "Determining whether this benefit is due to reduced consumption of carbohydrates or greater intake of vegetables will require future prospective randomized trials."

Low fat diet with fish oil supplements slow down prostate cancer progression

Scientists from UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center reported in the American Association for Cancer Research that men who ate a low-fat diet with fish oil supplements had slower progressing prostate cancer compared to those on a traditional Western diet that was high in fat.

The researchers also found that the participants on a low-fat, fish oil supplement diet were able to change the structure of the cell membranes in both healthy and malignant cells in the prostate. They wrote "They had increased levels of omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil and decreased levels of omega-6 fatty acids from corn oil in the cell membranes, which may directly affect the biology of the cells, though further studies are needed."

When blood samples were tested in a test tube, the team found that the growth of prostate cancer cells was much slower among the men on the low-fat, fish oil supplement diet.

Mediterranean diet reduces prostate cancer risk

An article published in UroToday showed that a traditional Cretan Mediterranean diet may help reduce the risk of prostate cancer. A typical diet from Crete, a Greek island in the Mediterranean, is based on plenty of plant foods (vegetables, fruits, wholegrain cereals, legumes and nuts), olive oil as the main source of dietary fat, low red meat consumption, moderate to low consumption of dairy products, moderate to high fish intake, and moderate intake of wine (consumed mainly with meals).

The authors added that the Mediterranean diet has other health benefits and can help protect against cardiovascular and cancer mortality, as well as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Vegan diet plus exercise may halt/reverse prostate cancer progression

Men with early stage prostate cancer who adopted a vegan diet and did plenty of exercise were more likely to stop and even reverse their cancer progression, researchers from the Department of Urology, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center reported in the Journal of Urology (September 2005 issue).

The authors claimed that theirs was the first randomized, controlled trial that demonstrated clearly that lifestyle changes may influence the progression of any type of cancer.

Written by Christian Nordqvist
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

Visit our prostate / prostate cancer section for the latest news on this subject. "Fat Intake After Diagnosis and Risk of Lethal Prostate Cancer and All-Cause Mortality"
Erin L. Richman, ScD; Stacey A. Kenfield, ScD; Jorge E. Chavarro, MD, ScD; Meir J. Stampfer, MD, DrPH; Edward L. Giovannucci, MD, ScD; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; June M. Chan, ScD
JAMA Intern Med. 2013;():1-8. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.6536

Invited Commentary
"Dietary Fat and Reduced Prostate Cancer Mortality: Does the Type of Fat Matter?Comment on “Fat Intake After Diagnosis and Risk of Lethal Prostate Cancer and All-Cause Mortality”
Stephen J. Freedland, MD
JAMA Intern Med. 2013;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.7744

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Aspirin May Reduce Risk of Breast Cancer Recurrence and Death

Among women who are at least one year beyond a diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer, regular aspirin use may reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence and death. These results were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) include drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen. These drugs are commonly used to reduce inflammation and relieve pain. Studies conducted in the lab suggest that these drugs may have the ability to reduce breast cancer growth.

To explore the relationship between aspirin use and breast cancer outcomes, researchers conducted a study among more than 4,000 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study. The women included in the analysis had been diagnosed with Stage I-Stage III breast cancer between 1976 and 2002, and were observed until 2006.

Because women undergoing cancer treatment may need to avoid aspirin, information about aspirin use was not collected until at least one year after breast cancer diagnosis.

Compared with women who reported no aspirin use, risk of breast cancer death was reduced by 71% among women who used aspirin 2-5 times per week and by 64% among women who used aspirin 6-7 days per week.? Risk of distant recurrence was also reduced among aspirin users.The effect of aspirin on risk of distant recurrence and death did not appear to vary by cancer stage, menopausal status, body mass index, or estrogen receptor status.

These results suggest that among women living at least one year after a breast cancer diagnosis, regular aspirin use may reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and death. However, there are significant limitations of the study and aspirin should not be considered a standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrence.? In addition, there are risks associated with regular aspirin use.? Women with a history of breast cancer should talk to their doctors if they have further questions.

Reference: Holmes MD, Chen WY, Li L et al. Aspirin intake and survival after breast cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology [early online publication]. February 16, 2010.

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Depressive symptoms are linked to premature death among Cancer Survivors

Main category: Cancer / Oncology
Also included in: Depression;??Colorectal cancer;??Lymphoma / leukemia / myeloma
Article Date: 20 may 2013-0:00 PDT current ratings for:
Depressive symptoms are linked to premature death among Cancer Survivors

Surviving cancer depressed are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who do not suffer from depression, regardless of the site of the cancer. This is according to a new study, Floortje Mols and his colleagues, from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. Their work is published online in the Journal from Springer to Cancer survival.

The prevalence of cancer is on the rise, as are the number of people who are cured of their cancer or live with it as a chronic disease. This is partly due to the aging of the population and more effective treatments. Thus, many of these survivors face persistent problems due to cancer and its treatments, such as a high prevalence of depression.

Mols and the team considered whether symptoms of depression observed between one and ten years after the diagnosis of cancer were related to an increased risk of premature death of two or three years later. Their work focused on endometrial cancer survivors, colorectal, lymphoma or multiple myeloma, where little work by watching this possible link was made so far.

They analyzed data collected from several major surveys on the population in 2008 and 2009. A total of 3,080 cancer survivors completed questionnaires to identify the symptoms of depression.

The authors found that depression increased the risk of death: high levels of depressive symptoms clinically were more common in those who died than those who survived. Overall, after controlling for treatment, cancer type, comorbidity, and metastasis, cancer one-to-ten years suffering from depression survivors were two times more likely to have died at the beginning.

The researchers conclude: "attention to the recognition and treatment of depressive symptoms in this group of patients is the key. The next step is to study possible mechanisms that could explain the association between depressive symptoms and the death from cancer. We also need to better understand if the treatment of depressive symptoms in cancer patients have effects extend the life. ?

Article adapted by Medical News Today press release original. Click on "references" tab above for the source.
Visit our cancer / Oncology section for the latest news on this subject. Mols, f. et al. (2013), depressive symptoms are a risk factor for all-cause mortality: results of a prospective study on the population among 3,080 cancer survivors from the register of profiles, Journal of Cancer survival. DOI 10.1007/s11764-013-0286-6
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