DISCLAIMER: This article contains references to cancer and the actor’s medical journey.Sanjay Dutt is one such Bollywood star who has faced many ups and downs in life, a journey so dramatic that much of it was shown in his biopic ‘Sanju’. He has never shied away from speaking about the most difficult and vulnerable chapters of his life. Among the hardest was his cancer diagnosis, a moment that left him shaken and emotional. The ‘Vaastav’ actor once opened up about how he dealt with this shocking news and found the strength to face it.
Sanjay’s cancer was diagnosed during the lockdown period
Speaking to YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia on his podcast in the past, the ‘Khalnayak’ actor revealed that he was diagnosed during the lockdown and initially struggled to process the news.He said, “It was a normal day in the lockdown. When I walked up the stairs, I was totally out of breath. I had a bath, I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t know what was happening, so I called up my doctor. In the x-ray, more than half of my lungs were covered in water. They had to tap the water out. They all were hoping it was TB (tuberculosis) but it turned out to be cancer.”
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Sanjay cried for hours thinking about family
Sanjay Dutt had shared how overwhelmed he felt after hearing the diagnosis. He explained, “How to break it to me, it was a big issue. I could have broken somebody’s face. So, my sister came, I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got cancer, now what?’. Then you start planning this, we’ll do this and that… But I did cry for two-three hours because I was thinking about my kids and my life and my wife and everything, these flashes come and I said, I am going to stop getting weak. First, we decided (to seek treatment in the US), but didn’t get the visa, so I said, I’ll do it here.”
Family and Rakesh Roshan helped plan his cancer treatment
The ‘Saajan’ actor explained how his family organised his treatment and how Rakesh Roshan, father of Hrithik Roshan, recommended a doctor.He added, “They told me that I’d lose hair and other things would happen, I’d vomit, so I told the doctor ‘mereko kuch nahi hoga’, I’ll not lose hair, I’ll not vomit, I won’t lie on the bed, and she kind of smiled. I did my chemotherapy, and I came back and I sat on that bike for one hour and I cycled, I did that day after day, everyday. After every chemo (session) I did that. It was crazy, I used to go for chemo, Dubai, and then I used to go to the badminton court and play for two-three hours.”
Dutt used fitness to regain his old self
The ‘Agneepath’ actor revealed how he challenged cancer by taking up fitness and slowly regaining his strength. He explained that the only way to fight the disease was by challenging it. Sharing his progress, he said it had been two months since he started going to the gym, where he had lost weight, regained muscle, and was slowly returning to his old self. He added that he wanted to bring back the Sanjay Dutt everyone knew and admitted that while he had once let himself go, he would not do so again.
Sanjay announced he is cancer-free in 2020
In October 2020, Sanjay Dutt announced that he was cancer-free, much to the joy of his fans and well-wishers. He credited his recovery to his own resilience and the support of his family.
Sanjay Dutt’s film projects
On the work front, Sanjay Dutt’s recent film ‘Baaghi 4’ starring Tiger Shroff released in cinemas on September 5, 2025. His next film, the Ranveer Singh-starrer ‘Dhurandhar’, is slated for release in December 2025.
Expensive, over-the-counter hormone tests for menopause are clinically useless and risk undermining women’s healthcare, senior doctors have warned.
The testing kits, offered by private clinics and available to buy for self-testing, claim to offer tailored insights through measuring hormone levels. But they have been described by experts as misleading and medically unnecessary.
“There are lots of private healthcare and telehealth clinics offering tests and increasing numbers of medically untrained, self-proclaimed ‘experts’ giving advice on social media and podcasts to get these tests done,” said Dr Stephanie Sterry, who recently co-wrote an editorial for the BMJ titled Menopause Misinformation is Harming Care.
“Unfortunately, these tests are not evidence-based,” she added. “They’re not giving us any new information or making treatment more effective. All they are doing is encouraging women to spend hundreds of pounds on tests that don’t make any difference to the treatment they should be given.”
There are two types of menopause hormone kits in the UK: rapid urine-based tests – some of which claim to give results in just two minutes – and finger-prick blood tests, which are sent for laboratory analysis with results guaranteed in one to two days.
Urine tests are available in high street shops including Asda and Superdrug for about £8. Blood tests range from £32 at Asda Online to £189 at Bluecrest Wellness.
Guidelines from Nice, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the British Menopause Society agree that for women over 45, menopause should be diagnosed based on symptoms alone. Hormone levels fluctuate daily and, experts agree, offer no reliable diagnostic value.
“These tests are marketed to patients and clinicians as necessary for ‘individualising’ hormone therapy,” Sterry said. “Yet in reality, these tests are of limited clinical use because there is no clearly defined therapeutic window for menopausal hormone therapy, and some testing techniques do not offer accurate or precise assessment of hormone levels.”
For perimenopause and menopause, she added, hormone testing offers no reliable way to determine who will benefit from treatment, when the final menstrual period will occur or whether it is safe to discontinue contraception.
Dr Paula Briggs, chair of the British Menopause Society, agreed. “Things have gone very wrong,” she said. “The growing popularity of these tests has led to women having unrealistic expectations about what HRT can offer – particularly around mental illness and the existence of a ‘quick fix’. That, in turn, leads to the rise of unregulated treatments like expensive bioidentical hormones.”
Briggs emphasised the need for collaborative, NHS-led care. She said that she is so concerned about the commercialisation of women’s health that she no longer practises privately.
Dr Susanna Unsworth, a menopause and women’s health specialist, agreed that hormone tests were “absolutely” harming care and are a “significant” problem.
“I am definitely seeing this more,” she said. “Women often ask me before their appointment if they need blood tests done first. My answer is almost always no but increasingly, they turn up with pages of results they have organised themselves.
“The trouble is, most of these results cannot be interpreted meaningfully and that puts us both in a difficult position: the companies often advise women to take these results to their menopause doctor, so when I explain that they do not add value, it undermines their trust in me,” she added.
Dr Martin Thornton, medical director at the private clinic Bluecrest, defended his use of the tests.
Pointing out that they offer a GP consultation with the data results, he said: “A lot of this is about empowering women by providing them with data to correlate to their symptoms, because a lot of the symptoms are not straightforward.
“Testing allows people to open up a dialogue with their doctor and can help you understand if it’s the menopause or something else,” he said.
But Sterry rebutted that: “There is no evidence that the symptoms a women experiences in perimenopause or the severity of those symptoms, correlates to data received from blood tests.
“If a women has symptoms and her tests show no signs of menopause, then that can be very confusing,” she added. “This leads to underdiagnosis and undertreatment.
“The principle of evidence-based practice is that a test should be done only if its result will directly guide patient care,” she said. “Hormone testing in menopause treatment is not supported by evidence and does not improve care. Treatment should be guided by a patient’s individual symptoms and not by treating the numbers.”
Asda has been approached for comment. A Superdrug spokesperson said: “Following customer feedback we launched the FSH [follicle stimulating hormone] test as women told us that they would like the choice to be able to measure their FSH levels.
“Your result comes with tailored medical advice from our doctors based on a combination of the assessment answers, and the test result.”
Can genetic editing help improve the overall health of people living with type 1 diabetes? The results of a recent study involving CRISPR technology and pancreatic cells shows promising signs that that question can be answered in the affirmative. Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper showing evidence that edited pancreatic cells could be transplanted into someone with type 1 diabetes without suppressing their immune system — and that the patient’s body began producing insulin afterwards.
As the paper’s authors pointed out, the process of suppressing someone’s immune system in order to transplant tissue from a donor “is associated with wide-ranging side effects.” The cells transplanted into the patient described in the study were genetically altered “to avoid rejection.” Twelve weeks after the procedure, the patient’s immune system did not appear to be rejecting the cells.
The lead author of the study, Uppsala University Hospital’s Per-Ola Carlsson, MD, explained why this important. “Although it is well established that pancreatic islet cell transplantation at a target therapeutic dose can predictably allow patients with type 1 diabetes to live without insulin therapy, until now these patients must take lifelong, significant immunosuppression, which is frequently toxic and difficult to tolerate,” Carlsson said in a statement.
What does this mean for the future of diabetes treatment? At Nature, Elie Dolgin explored the study’s results — and the work being done by the company Sana Biotechnology, whose technology was used to create the pancreatic cells used in the study. Dolgin notes that some experts have been more confident in the study’s impact than others. Nature reports that Sana, as well as other companies developing similar technology, have more studies scheduled for 2026.
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SINGAPORE – Many dog owners use the word “cataracts” when they see cloudiness in their dogs’ eyes, drawing from their knowledge of how cataracts affect ageing people.
However, what they are seeing is often nuclear sclerosis, not cataracts. Every dog will experience nuclear sclerosis, which is a normal change as a result of ageing that makes the lens appear slightly cloudy, like looking through lightly frosted glass.
Unlike cataracts, nuclear sclerosis does not cause pain or vision loss. True cataracts are opacities in the lens that block vision. A veterinary ophthalmologist’s specialised equipment and knowledge can help to differentiate the two conditions.
While nuclear sclerosis occurs in cats, it does not look so white in their eyes compared with the condition in dogs.
In Singapore, lanosterol eye drops are being marketed for dissolving cataracts in dogs, but these products may rob dogs of their sight by delaying proper treatment.
Dog owners may opt for these eye drops to avoid general anaesthesia and surgery, as well as for ease of their use, accessibility and seemingly few side effects.
Companies selling these eye drops mainly cite one published 2015 journal article that has since been debunked. However, these eye drops, sold at some veterinary clinics in Singapore, continue to sell like hot cakes despite poor evidence supporting their use.
In the 2015 study, which was published in academic journal Nature, photographs showing the reduction in cataract severity in dogs were subjectively graded. The pictures appeared to show nuclear sclerosis (normal lens ageing change) rather than cataracts.
A dog experiencing nuclear sclerosis, which is a normal ageing change that makes the lens appear slightly cloudy, like looking through lightly frosted glass.
PHOTO: GLADYS BOO
Lanosterol has poor penetrative ability and is unlikely to reach the lens after application on the surface of the eye.
A 2019 study showed that compounds such as lanosterol fail to restore lens clarity.
The “success” stories owners report may be due to misunderstanding. Dog lenses look different under various lighting conditions, making it easy to imagine improvement.
If the dog has only nuclear sclerosis, owners may think the drops work because their dog has not gone blind after years of use. When dogs develop true cataracts later, owners may assume the drops initially helped prolong their dog’s vision.
One concerning scenario is when an untreated cataract causes the lens to dislocate and drop into the back of the eye, a condition known as lens luxation.
The cataract disappears from view, leading owners to believe the drops dissolved it. But this is not due to the drops – it is usually followed by serious complications like glaucoma and retinal detachments.
Glaucoma is a condition when the eye pressure increases, causing irreversible blindness and pain; often necessitating eye removal for pain relief.
In dogs that actually have cataracts, using these eye drops delay owners from seeking treatment.
True cataracts can cause glaucoma, inflammation and retinal detachments. These secondary complications usually lead to pain in the dog’s eye.
As a last resort, an ophthalmologist may have to recommend removal of the eyeballs for pain relief.
The eye cannot be saved after the narrow window of opportunity to perform cataract surgery has passed.
Symptoms to watch out for include cloudiness in the eye, redness, squinting, bumping into things or seeming unconfident on walks or finding toys.
Seek advice from your vet who may be able to perform a general eye examination. Your vet may refer you to a board-certified veterinary ophthalmologist for a definitive diagnosis.
Cataracts in dogs are commonly inherited rather than caused by old age. In addition, they can develop overnight and become a surgical emergency. This condition occurs very frequently in dogs in Singapore because of the poor inbreeding practices here.
Do not waste your money on unproven therapies. It will prove to be more expensive after totalling the cost of placebos and the vet visits to deal with complications.
Sight is a precious gift to any living being. Without it, the pleasures of life can be diminished.
Dr Gladys Boo is the only Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologist in Singapore. She is a veterinarian at The Eye Specialist for Animals.
Vet Talk is a fortnightly column where veterinarians offer advice on pet issues.
Most of the richest sources of omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA and EPA, are fatty fish like sardines, mackerel, and salmon. Not only are they a part of the brain cell membrane structure, but they also help make it possible for growth and synapses of neurons. Research has established that consuming at least one serving of fish every week has been associated with a lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The anti-inflammatory effect of the omega-3s also strengthens brain resilience, and oily fish is a central ingredient in brain-preserving diets such as the Mediterranean and MIND diets.
How to consume: Can be employed in making fish curry (traditional Goan or Kerala-style fish curry). It can be grilled and consumed by shallow frying in a pan.
