Inside Jobs: hormone snarl

Apple founder and Chief Executive Steve Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer, issued a rare personal statement yesterday blaming a nutritional disorder for the dramatic weight loss that has prompted fears about his health.

The statement immediately halted a steady decline in Apple shares, which have fallen by more than 45 percent in the last six months. In early trading on the Nasdaq yesterday, Apple shares rallied by nearly three percent.

Jobs, 53, said in a public letter that his thinness had been a mystery even to him and his doctors until a few weeks ago, when “sophisticated blood tests” confirmed that he has “a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.”

His gaunt appearance and failure to appear at leading industry events prompted speculation that his cancer had returned.

But Jobs said he will undergo a “relatively simple” treatment and will remain in charge of Apple.

Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976 at the dawn of the personal computer revolution, left in 1985 and returned as CEO in 1997, is considered a marketing and design guru whose demanding standards have made Mac computers, iPods and iPhones into standout products.

Jobs announced in 2004 that he had undergone successful surgery to treat a very rare form of pancreatic cancer — an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. The cancer is easily cured if diagnosed early. Jobs did not have a deadlier and more common form of pancreatic cancer called adenocarcinoma.

Even so, fears that Apple would lose his leadership percolated in 2008 as Jobs appeared to be growing increasingly gaunt.    

METRO/AP