Cancer-related stigma kills thousands

The country's largest meeting of cancer experts unveiled several advances on Saturday. The horrible news is what does not improve. Only 4% of men and women at high risk of lung cancer suffering from lung cancer will undergo a scan to detect it while it is curable. This figure of 4% has barely moved in a decade. Lung cancer detected before coughing or other symptoms is curable at least 80% to 90%. People who wait until they feel sick have as little as 10% chance of surviving.

The cost is not the problem. The insurance can pay for CT scanners (abbreviated tomodensitometry). But the public has no idea of ​​their necessity. There is no public campaign because lung cancer is a politically incorrect disease, tainted by its link with tobacco. Most politicians, charities and underwriters did not want to touch it.

Unlike breast cancer. Everyone wants to join the war against that. An infinite range of products ranging from M & Ms to lipstick wears the pink breast cancer ribbon. In 2016, all presidential candidates were asked where they stood in the face of breast cancer, as if anybody could support him. A Maine newspaper announced that Senator Susan Collins "is striving to end breast cancer by 2020". Here in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has touted a 2016 law banning copays for breast cancer screening. It does not matter if the federal law has already done that. Politicians are eager to bask in the light of a pink campaign on a blameless illness.

All this advertising and political mojo works. Some 68% of women regularly undergo mammograms from the age of 55. "Women do not even ask their doctor if they should have a mammogram, they just do it," says Dr. Daniel Libby, clinical professor of pneumology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "But they do not hear the message that they have a history of smoking, they also need a lung scanner."

Lung cancer advocates need to take a page of the pink ribbon campaign. Nearly twice as many women die of lung cancer than breast cancer. David Yankelevitz, professor of radiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, warns David Yankelevitz 1.5 to 2 times more than men who smoke so much.

The fear of false positives prevents some people from being scanned. With a false positive, the scanner shows a spot on the lung and the patient undergoes a biopsy or waits for months in anxiety for another scan before discovering that it is not a cancer.

New research published in Nature Medicine shows that artificial intelligence – computers that make algorithm-based decisions – may soon eliminate most false positives. Until then, it's not a joke, says Libby, but it's just as terrible as discovering that you have advanced cancer that can not be cured.

The US Preventative Services Task Force recommends pulmonary CT scans for people aged 55 to 80 who smoked a pack a day for 30 years or two a day for 15 years and quit smoking less than 15 years ago . Mark Pasmantier, professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell and a leading cancer researcher, recommends even greater use. He said people who smoked a pack a day for 10 years should be scanned no matter how long they quit.

What about nonsmokers? Lung cancer is on the rise and non-smoking women are twice as affected as men. New data published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine show that the number of lung cancer deaths among non-smokers exceeds the number of deaths from ovarian cancer and cervical cancer. uterus in the United Kingdom.

Now that non-smokers are affected, the stigma around lung cancer fades. Meaning. Dianne Feinstein, Marco Rubio, Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito sponsor a bipartisan bill to promote lung cancer research and screening, particularly for women. "By 2019, about 66,000 women will die because of this terrible disease," says Feinstein, not to mention the number of male victims. Now that politicians are dealing with the issue, the next step is to choose a ribbon color.

Betsy McCaughey is a former Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York. Contact her at [email protected].