BREAKING: Jimmy Carter Says Cancer Has Spread To Brain

By MARC TORRENCE (Patch National Staff)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s cancer has spread to his brain, he said at a press conference Thursday in Atlanta.

Carter, 90, announced last week that he had been diagnosed with cancer while having liver surgery.

Doctors told him he has four “very small spots” of melanoma on his brain, Carter said in his first public comments since the diagnosis, adding that he thought at the time, “I thought I had just a few weeks left.”

Carter planned to undergo radiation treatment Thursday afternoon following the press conference and continue be treated at Emory hospital. In the mean time, “I’m going to cut back fairly dramatically on my obligations at Emory, at the Carter Center.”

“They have not found cancer on my pancreas, only my liver and my brain,” said Carter, whose brother, father and two sisters all died from pancreatic cancer.

He said he still hopes to take a trip to Nepal in November with Habitat for Humanity.

“Thinking of President Carter & his courage and honesty facing his own health problems & helping stop devastating diseases around the world,” Tom Friedan, director of the Centers for Disease Control, tweeted Thursday.

Carter’s diagnosis comes at a time when research and treatment of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is making significant ground. He will have some new, effective treatment options at his disposal that have only been approved in the last year.

“Had this happened five years ago, he would have had almost no options for treatment,” Tim Turnham, director of the Melanoma Research Foundation, told Patch. “And average life expectancy would have been measured in months, probably 10 or 11 months.”

Keytruda is the newest and most promising treatment for melanoma, approved by the FDA in September 2014. The drug activates resting antibodies that attack cancerous cells.

Its responsive about half the time, Turnham said.

“The best case scenario is that the radiation on his brain will get rid of those tumors, and that the Keytruda that he takes will take care of the tumor in his liver,” Turnham said. “And he will go on having many more years of service in ending river blindness.”

Carter served as the 39th president, from 1977 to 1981, and has been referred to, even among many of his detractors, as perhaps the most publicly active U.S. president in history.

He started the Carter Center in Atlanta in 1984 to advance human rights worldwide, which includes, as its website points out “resolving violent conflicts, avancing democracy and human rights, preventing diseases, and improving mental health care.”

Carter is also heavily involved in Habitat for Humanity, where he and his wife, Rosalynn started an annual week-long initiative to build houses while raising awareness for affordable housing.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

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