Adam Barsouk, "Outsmarting Cancer: Risk Reduction and the Power of Prevention" (JHU Press, 2026)

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**Adam Barsouk** (1:29)
Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Deidre Tyler** (1:33)
Hello everyone and welcome to The New Book Podcast. I am Deidre Tyler, the host. Today we'll be talking with Dr. Adam Barsouk, the author of Outsmarting Cancer, Risk Reduction, and the Power of Prevention.
How are you doing today?

**Adam Barsouk** (1:53)
I'm well. Thank you so much for having me.

**Deidre Tyler** (1:56)
Thank you. I wonder if you could start by saying a few words about yourself and how you got started on this project.

**Adam Barsouk** (2:05)
Of course. I am a medical oncologist at Hopkins Oncology Fellow at Hopkins University.
I got started down this path because when I was younger, I lost the grandparents who raised me to these rare blood cancers. I was there with them in the clinic translating for them when they were having their appointments.
Their diagnosis and their passing away inspired me to get involved in cancer research later to become a doctor. It was only years later that I realized that their rare blood cancers may have been related to the radiation exposure that they had having lived in Ukraine near the Chernobyl nuclear accident for so many years. And that got me kind of headed down this research rabbit hole where I learned how many cancers around the world, up to half of all cancers, are actually due to preventable causes. And that's what inspired me to want to share this knowledge with people, with lay audiences, to kind of bridge that gap between the research we have these days and what average people know about their cancer risk and how they can prevent cancer and prevent suffering like what we saw in my family.

**Deidre Tyler** (3:19)
Now, you started the book out by talking about a veteran. Tell us about this story.

**Adam Barsouk** (3:26)
Yeah, it was one of the patients that I had early on in my residency at the Veterans' Affair Hospital in Philadelphia. And it was a young gentleman who had just had a daughter, you know, in the prime of his life, I think late 30s, who just started having headaches one day, and no one could figure out why until they scanned his brain and saw a huge brain cancer, glioblastoma, which is, if you've ever heard of, is a very fatal disease of less than 5% of people live for more than a few years.
And unfortunately, this gentleman passed away. He left along young children, a wife to kind of fend for themselves. It was a very tragic case. And it was only later upon doing some digging that I realized how many veterans really fall ill with this rare brain cancer because of their exposure to burn pits. So during the Persian War, the Persian Gulf War, the Iraq War, right at military facilities, they were just burning trash in these really high temperature combustion pits. And we now know that that exposure in the air increases your risk of lots of different cancers, including this really deadly brain cancer. So his case, along with my grandparents, along with so many others that I've seen in my short time as a doctor, have really opened my eyes to how common it is for people to suffer from and even die from these preventable cancers.

**Deidre Tyler** (4:55)
Tell the audience about your title, Outsmarting Cancer.