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Pop star Michael Jackson's biographer claims he has Alpha-1 and is in desperate need of a lung transplant
Michael Jackson’s biographer claims the pop star is waging the fight of his life against Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, which has left him desperately in need of a lung transplant.
Author Ian Halperin told In Touch Weekly that Jackson “needs a lung transplant, but may be too weak to go through with it.”
Alpha-1 Foundation Clinical Director Robert A. Sandhaus, MD, noted that there has been no confirmation of Jackson’s illness other than the published report.
“If this diagnosis is confirmed, however, it would highlight the point we’ve long made that Alpha-1 is a condition that spans race, ethnic groups and nationalities,” Sandhaus said.
Foundation Scientific Director Adam Wanner, MD, noted that the Foundation recently awarded a grant to study the prevalence of Alpha-1 in African-Americans with COPD.
The study, funded by Baxter Healthcare, will test 400 African Americans with COPD and another 400 African Americans without COPD and aims to identify the genetic component of COPD susceptibility in African Americans, which may include Alpha-1.
The grant announcement noted, “Though Alpha-1 is found in all populations, testing for the condition is rarely done in African Americans with COPD because of a general belief that Alpha-1 is rare in this group. Yet African Americans are suffering from increasing rates of illness, emergency room visits, hospitalization and death from COPD.”
Geneticist Frederick J. de Serres, who has published research papers about the prevalence of Alpha-1 in the medical journal Chest and elsewhere, said the Alpha-1 gene has been confirmed in the African-American population in the United States.
De Serres has prepared a new study, not yet published, that estimates some 197,000 African-Americans in the United States have at least one Alpha-1 gene.
Halperin is a long-time investigative reporter. He made a name for himself by going undercover and posing as a model to report on the fashion industry in his book Shut Up and Smile, and most recently skewered Hollywood in Hollywood Undercover: Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown.
Jackson’s biographer Halperin also claims that the pop legend “has emphysema and chronic gastrointestinal bleeding, which his doctors have had a lot of trouble stopping.”
Halperin says that due to the ailment, Jackson, who turned 50 this year, “can barely speak” and that the “vision in his left eye is 95 percent gone.”
And while the breathing woes are surely something to worry about, Halperin claims that “it’s the bleeding that’s the most problematic part. It could kill him.”
Jermaine Jackson, Michael’s brother, told a British newspaper that Michael is “not doing so well right now. This isn’t a good time.”
