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Dolph Lundgren's First Symptom Of Cancer Recurrence Before Terminal Diagnosis
Rocky actor Dolph Lundgren was told he had a 'couple of years' left to live when his cancer returned - and it all started with a symptom that many people experience every day
Dolph Lundgren and Emma Krokdal married this month in Greece following his terminal diagnosis (Image: WireImage)
Dolph Lundgren and his partner Emma Krokdal tied the knot in a gorgeous ceremony in Mykonos this month.
Sadly, the grand Greek wedding came on the back of the Rocky actor's admission that he has just 'two to three years' left to live following an eight-year cancer journey.
The 65-year-old proposed to Emma, who is almost 40 years his junior, during a romantic getaway to Sweden, having gone public with their relationship several months before.
And Dolph recently admitted that he "appreciates life a lot more" after what he's been through over the past eight years.
Dolph Lundgren was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but only went public this year (Image:
Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images) Dolph married his fiancée after being given 'two to three years to live' (Image:
dolphlundgren/Instagram)Announcing the diagnosis in May, the Swedish film star said the first tumour was found in his kidney eight years ago. It was successfully removed and he enjoyed five years of clear scans before the cancer spread to his lungs, spine, liver and stomach in 2020. To his utter devastation, he was told that his cancer was terminal.
"[There was a] tumour in my kidney and they took it out in 2015 [...] but then they did a biopsy and it was cancerous," he explained. Over the following five years, Doplh continued to have scans which showed he was "fine".
Then an MRI in 2020 found "more tumours" following a worrying symptom. "I was back in Sweden and had some kind of acid reflux… so I did an MRI, and they found that there were a few more tumours around that area."
Speaking on In Depth With Graham Bensinger, Dolph said: "At that point, it started to hit me that this is kinda something serious." He managed to have six tumours removed but there was still one remaining tumour, the size of a lemon, that couldn't be removed as it had grown "too big" for surgery. As a result, he was put forward for systemic therapy, but suffered from side effects including diarrhoea and weight loss.
His then-fiancée Emma Krokdal, a personal trainer, recalled that her now husband's suffered from pain in his extremities and struggled to keep food down. "His mouth got really sore," Emma said during the interview with Graham. "His hands got sore, feet, and he couldn't eat anything warm, anything cold, anything spicy. So that was a struggle to get food down, so he kept losing weight."
Dolph alongside Sylvester Stallone on the set of Rocky IV (Image:
Corbis via Getty Images)Amid his battle, Dolph turned to his oncologist and asked for a prognosis. "So I kinda asked him y'know 'how long do you think I have got left?'" he explained. "I think he said two or three years but I could tell in his voice that he probably thought it was less."
Riddled with guilt for his family over having just a few years left, he sought out a second opinion from oncologist, Dr. Alexandra Drakaki. She luckily discovered a mutation in his kidney cancer that allowed her to treat it like a lung cancer, which opened more doors for treatment.
The Kindergarten Cop 2 stated: "If I'd gone on the other treatment, I had about three or four months left. I couldn't believe that it would be that radical of a difference that within three months, things were shrinking by 20, 30 percent."
Last year, his tumour reportedly shrunk by 90 percent. "Now I'm in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue of these tumours," he added. "Hopefully when they take these out, there is no cancer activity, and the medication that I'm taking is going to suppress everything else."
The Expendables star admitted that he used steroids early in his career and said he's considered the possibility that they have contributed to his cancer diagnosis later in life. He said in the interview: "I don't know if it has something to do with the cancer. Of course it struck me as it could have had something to do with it. I thought about it".
Dolph has two daughters close to his wife's age, including 27-year-old Ida and 21-year-old Greta. He shares the two with his ex-wife Anette Qviberg. According to the couple, they chose to tie the knot at their villa in Mykonos surrounded by their close friends and family.
"With both Covid and a long road of challenging medical treatments, we've had to push our marriage plans many times," they said. Speaking to People, the duo explained: "We felt it was finally the right time to celebrate love, life and happiness— in the land of the Gods."
'It's Some Sort Of Cosmic Joke': Tracy Sorensen Wrote A Book About Surviving Cancer. Now It Has Returned
It was a plot twist no one saw coming, least of all the author. Last month Tracy Sorensen was preparing to launch her highly anticipated second book, The Vitals – a playful and unconventional cancer memoir/novel written from the viewpoint of her organs – while dealing with a niggling winter cough.
The Miles Franklin-longlisted author and academic assumed she just had a chest infection. "They whacked me straight in for a chest X-ray and that was it, I was back in cancer land," she says from her home in Bathurst during downtime between infusions of chemotherapy and a targeted "biological agent" to treat lung cancer. It's a recurrence of the advanced primary peritoneal cancer she had – and vanquished – in 2014.
"Despite everything I know about cancer, having written a whole book about it, having immersed myself in it, it still feels shocking," Sorensen says. "[After] 8.5 of remission … it was absolutely the last thing I was expecting."
She "would not", she jests darkly, "advise this as a publicity stunt".
"Having the cancer recur right now is some sort of cosmic joke … But it goes with what I'm saying in the book, which is that it's absolutely laughable that we think we're in control of our lives."
Tracey Sorensen crocheted her abdominal organs as a creative outlet while undergoing treatment for advanced primary peritoneal cancer in 2014. Photograph: Monique Lovick/The GuardianAs a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, Sorensen had years earlier undergone risk-reduction surgery (a double mastectomy and ovariectomy) to try to dodge the "death sentence" that has stalked so many of her family members. So her 2014 cancer diagnosis came as a shock to Sorensen. "Primary peritoneal cancer is the kind of ovarian cancer you can still get even if you've had your ovaries removed," she explains. "And so I became this outlier … I'm an extremely rare case."
Surviving the ordeal – which she recounts in The Vitals in an action-packed piece of speculative nonfiction set inside the squishy confines of her peritoneal cavity – left her with fewer organs than she started with and gave her the "kick up the bum" she needed to finish her debut novel, which was published in 2018. The Lucky Galah, which she had been chipping away at for more than 15 years (the idea was already percolating when we worked together at a Sydney newspaper in 1999) was set in a remote Western Australian town during the 1969 moon landing and also features a non-human narrator: a flightless pet galah. The Lucky Galah soared, and was nominated for a slew of Australian literary prizes, including the 2019 Miles Franklin award.
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With cancer in the rear-view mirror, Sorensen pulled out the sack of life-sized woollen guts she had crocheted during her treatment in an effort to "get to know" her organs and began bringing them to life as characters on the page. It was a process, Sorensen says, of "extreme anthropomorphising".
Among The Vitals' cast is Peri the peritoneum, a ditzy conspiracy theorist loosely inspired by cancer fraudster Belle Gibson; a "wandering womb" named Ute who carts around two pet kelpies (ovaries) in her tray; a workaholic liver named Liv; a gluttonous stomach dubbed Gaster; and an anarcho-communist spleen named Rage who is seduced by an irresistible young tumour (and rampant capitalist) named Baby.
"The comic possibilities were just everywhere for me," says Sorensen. "And I had perfect licence to have fun with it because it was my own body.
"These organs [are] just stumbling around – they've got absolutely no idea what's really going on, but the reader knows what's going on, so you just keep playing with that, pushing it."
The result is a rollicking ride, as if The Poseidon Adventure, The Famous Five and Animal Farm were dunked in a vat of Ken Done Australiana, steeped in the philosophy of eco-feminist Val Plumwood and translated into satirical medicalese.
Pseudoscience, Sorenson says, 'overlaps with climate scepticism – so it's just a terrifying bundle'. Photograph: Monique Lovick/The GuardianIn late 2019, as Sorensen struggled to transform a "mountain of research" and medical jargon into whimsical metaphors, opportunity came knocking: she was awarded the $100,000 Judy Harris writer-in-residence fellowship, an annual grant given by the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre to a writer exploring health-related themes (previous recipients include Emily Maguire and Sorensen's literary mentor Charlotte Wood). She was given her own office inside the medical research institute; the specialists down the hall were only too keen to jump into the "creative playpen" with her.
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I'm writing The Vitals for people who are interested in radically new ways of seeing the world
Tracy SorensenWhen the pandemic struck a few months into her residency, Sorensen hotfooted it home to Bathurst, from where she would watch the institute's scientific seminars. It was those video conferences that gave her the idea for the organs in her novel to meet regularly via Zoom "as a metaphor – a way of conjuring the continuous communication between organs".
"The cancer memoir is normally written from the point of view of the important suffering cancer patient. I'm now a suffering cancer patient and I'm trying to save my life, so I'm not denigrating that. But there's always, always, always 50 million other points of view for every situation," she says.
"We need different ways of seeing ourselves. If we just go on saying 'We are the most important thing no matter what', we will destroy this planet. I'm writing [The Vitals] for people who are interested in radically new ways of seeing the world."
Sorensen says she was determined to limit "battle" tropes in The Vitals. "This idea that an ordinary person down the road who gets cancer caused it themselves and it's up to them to join the 'battle'; and 'fight' and 'win' is really exhausting when you're ill – that's a lot to put on people," she says.
"I think the idea of homeostasis is a much nicer way of thinking about this than war and battle metaphors because actually something happens and the cells respond … Which I just find awe-inspiring."
Sorensen also wanted to encourage readers to be curious about their anatomy and not ignore pesky symptoms. In The Vitals, Queen Bee – an avatar for Sorensen's brain – is too busy marking student papers to pay attention to her mutinous guts.
'The only thing I can do is to keep being incredibly philosophical': Tracy Sorensen at home in Bathurst, NSW. Photograph: Monique Lovick/The Guardian"Before 2014, I couldn't have told you precisely where my pancreas was, I couldn't have told you where my spleen was, I had never heard the words 'greater omentum'. All of this was a bag of mystery and it didn't bother me at all," she says. "When it's all working fine, you don't particularly need to know."
Another impetus for writing The Vitals was Sorensen's growing "exasperation and fear around anti-science sentiment". Pseudoscience, she says, "overlaps with climate scepticism – so it's just a terrifying bundle".
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"This is not a small thing for me; this is quite literally life-and-death," she says. "Are we going to have wellness warriors using their beautiful young bodies as kind of assets on social media to monetise people's fears and bandy about absolute nonsense?"
Being treated for lung cancer as Covid spreads unchecked poses a new challenge. "Last time [in 2014] I felt that all the problems were just coming from within, whereas now I'm incredibly conscious that any kind of chest infection would be really, deeply problematic for me," she says.
Still, says Sorensen, who turns 60 later this year, "The only thing I can do is to keep being incredibly philosophical. We all get a narrow band in history: that's our spot, so we come into it and go out of it in ways that we absolutely can't control. I'm just here for the ride in between."
How A Novel Drug May Improve Survival Rate For People With Some Types Of Lung Cancer
Adjuvant chemotherapy is less effective in people with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene than those with the wild-type version of the gene.
Researchers now report that the use of EGFR inhibitors can improve survival in these patients, but the emergence of resistance to these targeted treatments poses a challenge.
A recent phase 3 randomized clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that adjuvant treatment with osimertinib, a next-generation EGFR inhibitor, improved 5-year overall survival in early-stage NSCLC with an EGFR mutation after complete surgical removal of the tumor.
Their findings were presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
"The study demonstrated that adjuvant osimertinib, a third-generation epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor (EGFR-TKI), notably improves overall survival and reduces the risk of disease recurrence or death in patients with completely resected, early-stage, EGFR-mutated NSCLC," said Dr. Wael Harb, a hematologist and medical oncologist at MemorialCare Cancer Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center in California and vice president of medical affairs at Syneos Health.
"This is particularly important as previous adjuvant therapies, including chemotherapy and first- or second-generation EGFR-TKIs, have not shown such benefits," Harb, who was not part of the study, told Medical News Today.
"These results suggest that osimertinib is a new standard of care for resected, EGFR-mutated NSCLC, which can prevent or delay cancer from coming back or spreading to other parts of the body and potentially cure more patients with this type of lung cancer," he added.
Non-small cell lung cancer is one of the two primary types of lung cancer that accounts for 80% to 85% of lung cancer cases.
Based on the spread and size of the tumor, cancers can be assigned to stages 1 to 4, with a higher stage referring to greater progression of the disease.
Stage 1 and 2 cancers describe tumors that are either restricted to the tissue of origin or have spread to the adjacent tissue. Unlike stage 3 or 4 cancers, these tumors have not spread to nearby lymph nodes or metastasized to other parts of the body. As a result, stage 1 and 2 tumors can generally be completely resected or surgically removed.
In stage 3 of non-small cell lung cancer, the tumor has spread to a lymph node. However, in early-stage non-small cell lung cancers, such as stage 3A and 3B, the tumor can still be completely resected in some cases.
Oncologists often recommend chemotherapy or radiotherapy to reduce the risk of the recurrence of cancer after the surgical removal of the tumor. This course of treatment is prescribed to prevent the recurrence of cancer is known as adjuvant therapy.
However, past data has suggested that adjuvant chemotherapy in people with early-stage or locally advanced NSCLC confers limited benefits. Adjuvant chemotherapy is particularly less effective in individuals showing a mutation in the gene for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). EGFR is a protein that spans the membrane of human cells and activates other proteins upon its stimulation by the epidermal growth factor.
Through the activation of specific downstream pathways, the EGFR protein controls cell division and survival. Certain mutations in the EGFR protein, such as those observed in NSCLC, can enhance cell proliferation and cause drug resistance.
Considerable progress has been made in the development of drugs such as gefitinib and erlotinib that inhibit the part of the EGFR protein that activates downstream pathways. However, patients often develop resistance to these drugs within 10 to 14 months after treatment onset.
Osimertinib is a new-generation EGFR protein inhibitor that has shown efficacy in people with locally advanced NSCLC as well as in those with NSCLC whose tumor has metastasized to the central nervous system.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved osimertinib for the treatment of NSCLC based on data from the phase 3 ADAURA clinical trial. At the time of the approval, there was data showing that osimertinib enhances disease-free survival, which is the length of time from diagnosis or onset of treatment to the recurrence of cancer or death.
The gold standard for assessing the efficacy of cancer treatments in randomized clinical trials is overall survival. Overall survival refers to the fraction of surviving patients after a set period of time, generally 5 years, from treatment onset.
However, the impact of osimertinib on overall survival has not been examined.
As a continuation of the phase 3 ADAURA randomized clinical trial, the present study examined the benefits of osimertinib as adjuvant chemotherapy in improving overall survival.
This randomized controlled trial consisted of 682 adults with stage 1B, 2, or 3A lung cancer whose tumors had been completely removed by surgery. All patients included in the study had a specific type of mutation in the EGFR gene.
The participants were randomized to receive either osimertinib or a placebo as adjuvant therapy for 3 years. The treatment duration was shorter in case of disease recurrence or discontinuation by participants. The patients were regularly monitored over a duration of about 5 years to estimate overall survival.
The researchers reported that adjuvant therapy with osimertinib conferred greater overall survival benefits in patients with stage 2 to 3A lung cancer. Specifically, the 5-year survival rate in people receiving osimertinib was 85%, whereas the placebo group had an overall survival rate of 73%.
The 5-year overall survival in all patients, including those with stage 1B, 2, and 3 NSCLC, receiving osimertinib was 88%. In contrast, the participants that were administered the placebo had a 5-year survival rate of 78%.
In their previous publication, the researchers reported that people receiving osimertinib showed lower rates of disease recurrence than the placebo group. Furthermore, in the current study, the researchers found that 22% of people in the osimertinib group required additional treatment due to recurrence, compared with 54% in the placebo group.
Although these results are promising, Harb cautioned that the study had a few limitations. He noted that the clinical trial only included patients with specific types of EGFR mutations.
"The trial did not include patients with other types of EGFR mutations, such as exon 20 insertions, which may respond differently to Osimertinib," Harb said. "It also did not compare osimertinib with other EGFR-TKIs, such as gefitinib or erlotinib, which are also utilized as adjuvant therapies in some settings."
"The long-term safety and efficacy of osimertinib remain unknown as the median duration of treatment was only 22 months. These factors should be taken into account when interpreting the study's findings," he added.
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