How did  Toby Keith die

Country singer Toby Keith passed away on the night of January 62 at the age of 62. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer for over two years.

In June 2022, Keith announced on X that his diagnosis was made in the fall of 2021, and he had already undergone chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Then in June of last year, he told The Oklahoman newspaper that his tumor had shrunk by a third and he was continuing chemotherapy. He also received immunotherapy, a drug that helps the immune system destroy cancer cells.

His death has drawn attention to the symptoms of stomach cancer, including burning sensation in the chest, acidity, blood loss, nausea, loss of appetite after eating, weight loss, or feeling full after eating a small amount.

“Many of these symptoms are relatively harmless. But with cancer, it’s how you get them,” said Dr. Fabian Johnston, chief of the division of gastric oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Johnston said doctors and patients may be inclined to dismiss symptoms like acid reflux, potentially delaying diagnosis. He said many people are already sick by the time symptoms appear.

The average age at diagnosis is 68, and men are at significantly higher risk.

American Cancer Society estimates this, nearly 27,000  year new cases of stomach cancer will be diagnosed, although the patient still relatively rare: it accounts for about 1.5 percent of new cancers diagnosed in the United States every year.

mostly case of stomach cancer diagnosis have  decreased  past 10 years. But rates are increasing among adults under 50, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Dr. Ben Schechter, a medical oncologist specializing in gastric cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said, “Something’s happening – what we’re eating, what we’re eating, a combination of new and existing factors – that’s resulting in an increase in cancer in young people.”

Schechter said that alcohol and tobacco – once common culprits in stomach cancer – are now associated with minorities in America, perhaps because people smoke less.

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Instead, many new cases are found in people with chronic acid reflux or infection with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which can cause inflammation in the stomach. However, scientists have not identified why some people develop stomach cancer in these conditions and why most do not.

” patients, this is a mostly disease,” Schechter stated. “It could be related to H. pylori infection. It could be a history of heartburn or reflux, but generally it’s not so clear.”

Schechter told stomach cancer is mostly aggressive  other cancers.

“That doesn’t mean people are dying right away. It just means we have limited tools to treat them,” he told. “majority are feel much better outcomes compared to 15 years ago, but we may not be on par with breast cancer, where the vast majority of people are cured with treatment and chemotherapy.”

Up to 95 percent of stomach cancers in America are adenocarcinomas, which start in the innermost part of the stomach. From there, cancer can spread to the stomach wall, the body of the stomach, or lymph nodes.

Patients whose cancer does not spread often undergo chemotherapy or immunotherapy or a combination of these options, said Dr. Rupika Mehta, a medical oncologist in the gastro-oncology program at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

“In more advanced cases, we’re still not where we can offer patients ‘cure,'” she wrote in an email. However, she added that chemotherapy or immunotherapy could help prolong life.

Doctors are also getting better at matching patients with stomach cancer with targeted therapies that attack specific proteins associated with the disease. For instance, the breast cancer-related gene HER2 is expressed by a subset of stomach cancer patients.

“The drugs that work in HER2 breast cancer work in HER2 gastric cancer. So now we can give those drugs to stomach cancer patients and significantly increase their benefits from treatment,” Schechter said.

While outcomes for this disease are “generally poor,” he said, they are “much better than they used to be.”