A time-tested veteran of the nonprofit world, Nancy Torrison was hired in 2012 as the initial executive director of the Minnesota-based A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation. She has been there ever since, and shares her story with @CancerInterviews.

Unlike other cancers, it is not easy to get in front of lung cancer. Although the situation has improved and continues to improve, it is still difficult for people to get a lung cancer screening. As a result, when people are diagnosed with lung cancer, they are already at Stage III or Stage IV.

Nancy says one of the challenges facing lung cancer in general is a very unfortunate stigma attached to the disease, both by the medical community and the general public. Specifically, many people think that lung cancer is a disease tied to cigarette smoking, when Nancy says between 50 and 60 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers. Not only are those diagnosed with the disease addressed their being diagnosed is their fault, but because the medical community fails to take this statistic into consideration, it is more difficult for someone seeking a screening to get one, and/or what are actually lung cancer symptoms get misdiagnosed as something else.

Because of the possibility of misdiagnosis, Nancy recommends to anyone who has symptoms associated with cancer to get a low-dose CT scan. She tells the story of a woman who suffered from fatigue and shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed her with depression. Upon further review months later, they determined she had Stage IV lung cancer, and she died not long after that.

Nancy Torrison emphasizes the low-dose CT scan is the gold standard of lung cancer screening. She says research has shown that a chest x-ray does not provide the comprehensive data shown by the low-dose CT scan. Nancy laments that not enough people are eligible for a low-dose CT scan, but with more funding and more research, in years to come that statistic will improve.

While cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer, so, too, is radon. It is a gas in the soil one can neither see nor smell, but it can seep into one’s home whether the structure is new or old. Nancy urges one to go to a hardware and purchase a radon test kit for like $10. If you tack it to a wall in your home’s lower level, and leave it there for three or four days, you can then send it off to a lab to see if your home needs radon mitigation. That’s the procedure that can ultimately remove radon from the home, but it can be as much as a few thousand dollars.

Nancy Torrison says upon diagnosis, a patient well-educated on the subject has the best chance for survival. She recommends the website [ Ссылка ]. It has a wealth of information for people of all age group and diagnoses. As part of that education process, she also recommends one enquire about comprehensive biomarker testing. Because of tremendous advances in this field over the last decade, precise therapies can be found for those diagnosed with lung cancer, especially non-small cell lung cancer. Nancy says for the person diagnosed with lung cancer, if that person is at a facility that turns down a request for comprehensive biomarker testing, to find another facility.

The A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation exists to try and save lives and prevent the number of diagnoses around the country, knowing that 70 percent of the diagnoses are in Stage III or Stage IV. A lot of the work the Foundation does is with an eye toward increasing early detection, a big problem in lung cancer.

Nancy Torrison says if you are diagnosed with lung cancer to educate yourself and always be your one advocate.

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