Does Sex Matter?

Posted by Heinz-Josef Lenz, MD on February 9th, 2009

Sitting in the airplane from Los Angeles to Columbus where my two older daughters, 17 and 16, are competing for slots to represent the USA in the World Championships and Grand Prix events in diving, I am reviewing a manuscript that one of our fellows is planning to submit to a prestigious journal.

We are very excited by what we have found. It started more than 5 years ago, when we thought that we saw young females with colon cancer did worse than young males. We already knew that women are protected against colon cancer premenopausally, and large studies have shown that hormone replacement in postmenopausal women decreased colon cancer risk and polyp formation. We hypothesized that when a tumor develops under estrogen protection, the tumor might be more aggressive. Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing: From the Desk of Dr. Heinz-Josef Lenz

Posted by Heinz-Josef Lenz, MD on December 30th, 2008

Beginning in January, I will be blogging here at the C3 website.

I am a Gastrointestinal (GI) Oncologist at the University of Southern California (USC)/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. I am what people describe as a physician scientist, which means I do see patients and write a lot of clinical trials, but I also have a laboratory focusing on the molecular make up of tumors.

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