NOLA Bluedoo is a uniquely-New Orleans-style festival that raises research funds and promotes awareness of prostate cancer. It's the only event of its kind in our area!

Come enjoy great food, drink, music, costuming, kids' and survivors' tents, a walk/run and MORE, as you help to fight back against this disease that impacts one in eight of our men.

All funds raised – approximately $150,000 so far this year – benefit Dr. Oliver Sartor's Prostate Cancer Research Fund at Tulane Cancer Center. Dr. Sartor leads an internationally renowned research and treatment program here in New Orleans. He and his team have helped to drive great progress in the development and approval of new drugs for prostate cancer.

Over the past nine years, NOLA Bluedoo donors have helped to generate just over $1 million in research funding for Dr. Sartor and his team. Please join us in thanking this year's generous sponsors (as of August 16, 2022), listed below.

The incomparable Wendell Brunious and his band will be performing a "Tribute to Allen Toussaint" on the NOLA Bluedoo main stage, beginning at 4:30 p.m. Brunious previously played NOLA Bluedoo – as did the legendary Mr. Toussaint – and we are so happy to welcome him back!

Warming up the stage for Wendell and the gang will be the Tulane Soundwave Pep Band, No. 1 Saints fan Soul Saint and performance artist "Michael Jackson," as well as the Amelia Earhawts, the Pussyfooters, and the Baby Dolls, with special appearances by the Laissez Boys Social Aid and Leisure Club and the Harley Owners Group, who get the party started with their traditional engine rev at the start of the race.

NOLA Bluedoo features a two-mile competitive walk/run, held in conjunction with the New Orleans Track Club (NOTC), which takes walkers and runners on a tour across Tulane University’s beautiful Uptown campus. To register for the race, please click here. (Please note, walk/run registration fees primarily benefit the New Orleans Track Club.) You do not have to participate in the walk/run to attend NOLA Bluedoo.

Spread the word! NOLA Bluedoo is just as committed to raising awareness of prostate cancer as it is to raising research funds. Please join us and bring your family and friends.

And if you'd like to help support our Prostate Cancer Research Program, please click here for more information on sending a check or making your gift via credit card.

Donations can also be made at the event. Look for the "Bluedoo Central" tent!

Visit www.nolabluedoo.org or contact Melanie Cross – 504-988-6592, mcross@tulane.edu – or Keadren Green – 504-988-6064, kgreen2@tulane.edu.

See you at NOLA Bluedoo! 

And don't forget to wear blue – the color of prostate cancer awareness!

Attendees to NOLA Bluedoo 2022 will enjoy FREE waters and soft drinks, as well as beer, compliments of Second Line Brewing.

Because the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing staffing and supply chain issues were so devastating to our local restaurant industry, rather than ask for food donations to our event this year, we wanted to give back by providing food vendors the opportunity to sell their items at NOLA Bluedoo.

So come hungry and show your love to NOLA Bluedoo's 2022 food and beverage partners, listed below.

Please click here for pricing.

Please click here for pricing.

Please click here for pricing.

Please click here for pricing.

Please click here for pricing.

www.nolabluedoo.org

Joe Holyfield

New Orleans Magazine’s annual “Top Doctors” issue (August 2022) named 18 Tulane Cancer Center faculty members as tops in their respective fields, including three who were among the area’s best medical oncology specialists:  

Brian Lewis, MD, MPH

New Orleans Magazine utilized the services of Castle Connolly Top Doctors, a healthcare research company and the official source for Top Doctors for the past 25 years, to compile this year’s list.

Castle Connolly’s established nomination survey, research, screening and selection process involves many hundreds of thousands of physicians as well as academic medical centers, specialty hospitals and regional and community hospitals all across the nation.

The online nominations process is open to all licensed physicians in America who are able to nominate physicians in any medical specialty and in any part of the country. Once nominated, Castle Connolly’s physician-led team of researchers follows a rigorous screening process to select Top Doctors who meet the Castle Connolly standards.

Careful screening of doctors’ educational and professional experience is essential before final selection is made among those physicians most highly regarded by their peers. Doctors do not and cannot pay to be selected and profiled as Castle Connolly Top Doctors.

L. Spencer Krane, MD—Urology

A Tulane dermatologist noticed an uptick in patients coming in with a rare skin cancer, which led her to investigate what could be contributing to the increase.

Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL), a rare type of lymphoma that presents in the skin, has been on the rise in Louisiana for the past 10 years. Andrea Murina, MD, associate professor of dermatology and dermatology residency program director at Tulane University School of Medicine, recently investigated the numbers of cases of CTCL in Louisiana. Murina says an increasing number of patients are being diagnosed with CTCL year to year. The investigators wrote up their findings in a research letter for JAMA Oncology.

“Dermatologists are often the first specialists to diagnose and treat patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, which is unique because it is a lymphoma that appears on the skin,” Murina said. “I’ve been seeing the number of patients affected by this in the New Orleans area increase over the years, so we decided to do some research and contact the Louisiana tumor registry to take a closer look at the numbers in Louisiana. We had a hint that certain populations could have higher rates of CTCL.”

According to Murina, CTCL can sometimes be mistaken for eczema or psoriasis before it’s properly diagnosed, which leads to delay of diagnosis and patients diagnosed at a later/higher stage.

“CTCL is very rare, but we have two specialty cutaneous lymphoma clinics in New Orleans and we see people from all over the Gulf South region. We have a high demand for new patients, which made me curious to take a deeper dive into what the incidence rates are in Louisiana.” Murina said.

To collect more information on CTCL rates in Louisiana, Murina and her team gathered data from the Louisiana tumor registry and electronic health records from two New Orleans clinics. They used sex, age, race, age at diagnosis, year of diagnosis, CTCL primary site and behavior data to conduct a population analysis.

Although the researchers weren’t able to confirm a direct link to what’s causing the increase, they did discover that African American patients with CTCL had greater odds of being diagnosed in a later stage of the disease than white patients. They also discovered that age, race, and ethnicity were not significantly associated with CTCL subtypes.

“We also looked at clusters in Louisiana to see if there were geographical regions where CTCL is more common, and it turns out that in Louisiana, the incidence is clustered in certain regions of the state,” Murina said. “This led us to believe that the increase could be related to the environment, so we looked at the relationship to the known benzene and tricholoroethylene levels in the air of these high-risk regions, but we found no correlation.”

To find out what’s causing the clusters to grow, Murina says the next steps are to revisit the data and find different commonalities among the patients, like what jobs they have and the industries in which they’ve worked.

“The fact is, the clustering phenomenon still exists, and we suspect that it's something environmental leading to additional cases beyond the normal rate that we would expect in certain regions of Louisiana.”

Join the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Departments of Urology, Medical Oncology, and Radiation Oncology at Tulane for a Prostate Cancer Patient Summit – Saturday, September 24, at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans, 8 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Leading experts will discuss everything you want to know about prostate cancer, from prevention to diagnosis to state-of-the-art treatment and clinical trials.

To RSVP for this FREE event, please email pbarata@tulane.edu or call 216-262-1214 by September 16.