• 5/25/2008
  • Omaha, NE
  • Jenny Nowatzke
  • KPTM Fox42 News (www.kptm.com)

Patients with head or neck cancer only make up 2% of all cancer cases. But, a staggering 20% of those patients end up committing suicide. Now, a local doctor is determined to reduce that number all the way down to zero.

“You just feel helpless and selfless and after awhile, you give up hope,” said John Allbery.

Five years ago, Allbery was faced with the fight of his life – throat cancer. He wasn’t a smoker, so when he heard the doctor’s words, he was speechless.

“Naturally, I didn’t believe it,” he said. After undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, Dr. Bill Lydiatt with the Nebraska Medical Center asked Allbery to help him with a new clinical trial.

Its goal – to reduce the risk of depression and suicide in head and neck cancer patients. “We tried to look at ways to intervene to make this a better outcome for them,” Lydiatt said.

He gave half the patients a placebo, and the other an antidepressant. After 12 weeks, he says the results were amazing.

“The group that had the placebo had a fifty percent of depression, compared to fifteen percent in the treatment group,” Lydiatt said.

Allbery says, lucky for him, he was in the right group. “Thinking back now, now that I know I got the drug, I can’t even imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t.” With the success of the first trial, Lydiatt received a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Institute of Health.

That money is now being used for a second trial, which is already underway. He’s hoping to have those results in three years.