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Lung Cancer News: National Foundation Raises Awareness For Number One Cancer Killer

By Kevin Meagher, staff writer

Number One Cancer Killer Gets Its Walk

SAN FRANCISCO (RPRN) 7/28/2009--On August 2nd the Bonnie J Addario Lung Cancer Foundation is sponsoring a 5k walk/run in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco. The first of its kind for lung cancer in San Francisco, the Addario Foundation will be chalking up another success towards raising awareness and funds for what the American Cancer Society tells us is the deadliest of all cancers.

According to the Lung Cancer Review, 450 people die every day from lung cancer in the United states alone. Though over ½ of lung cancer patients quit smoking decades prior to diagnoses or never smoked at all, it has been greatly stigmatized by its association with smoking.

The Addario Foundation believes that this is largely the reason that the funding allocated by the federal government is only ¼ the amount that is put towards breast cancer in its yearly budget. While according to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer kills more people annually than breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer combined.

The Addario Foundation has a problem with those and many other statistics which expose disparaging differences in the funding for lung cancer versus other cancers with better survivability ratings.

A cancer survivor herself, Bonnie Addario was diagnosed with, and lost a lung to the disease back in 2004. Not every cancer victim has the resources or the motivation to start a foundation, but when Bonnie saw the statistics she decided that something must be done.

“First of all, you have to be just a tad insane“ Said Addario to RPRN,
“Honestly, I look back on all of this and really had no idea where it was going to go. I originally thought what I would do is start this foundation and you know, have a gala and maybe a golf tournament, maybe a run, and give all of the money to UCSF for research. But then I discovered that really more needed to be done all across the United States and even in other countries”.

With the lack of funding for new treatment methods evident, Addario started doing research of her own, “Nothing I read or researched on my own indicated that there was really any work being done on any genetic propensity for this disease, and it had always been blamed on smoking”.

A smoker herself for 20 years, Addario understood the stigma. But after losing five members of her family to lung cancer, she realized that there was an obvious pattern, one that surprised her. “When I realized that 60% of the newly diagnosed cases of lung cancer were either in people who quit smoking decades ago, or never started at all. I really thought: I need to look into this genetic issue a little bit more. I did some random checking and research; talking to people and what have you, and now there is a consensus.”

It was around then that Addario decided it was time to launch her second endeavor into the Lung Cancer world. In 2008 she founded the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALCMI, pronounced ‘alchemy‘). “ALCMI is dedicated solely to research and genomic and collaborations with other institutions. We are actually going to be the first ones who are collectively and collaboratively screening tissue samples for lung cancer bio-markers. There are other entities that are doing some bio-marker research randomly and somewhat after the fact, but we are going to be doing it early on in the patient’s care”.

Addario told RPRN that the research has not found that in all cases of lung cancer has the patient been genetically predisposed, “but now that they are looking for bio-markers for this disease, its looking more and more like that.”

The research ALCMI is doing suggests that some of us are more predisposed to different types of cancer than others and if we avoid things that may activate our cells we may be able to avoid getting the disease. “Lung cancer can be smoking, it can be radon, it can be asbestos, really it can be any kind of toxin you are exposed to on a regular basis. They can activate the cell and make it say, ‘ok, go turn yourself into cancer. And this goes for breast cancer, prostate cancer, whatever”

Presently, says the American Cancer Society, the most common method of diagnoses for lung cancer involves getting a CT scan. By looking for lesions in the images provided by the scan, shadows in the image can expose problem areas. The next step is to get a somewhat invasive biopsy from the highlighted area which quite often is benign or not unhealthy tissue at all.

Significantly, studies done by  Dr. Joseph R. DiFranza, a family health and community medicine specialist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, demonstrate that teens can become addicted to nicotine after just one smoke. DiFranza told the New York Times during a February 12, 2008 interview that "“We have long assumed that kids got addicted because they were smoking 5 or 10 cigarettes a day,” furthermore adding, “Now we know that they risk addiction after trying a cigarette just once.”

At the end of this  interview, Addario made it clear to RPRN that this walk/run event for lung cancer is about raising awareness and clearing the dark cloud surrounding the disease more than anything else, “ I can‘t go back to when I was 16 and not go into my girlfriend‘s basement and have a cigarette,” Addario said to RPRN, “ and we all make mistakes in our youth, but does that mean we  shouldn't get the same care as other cancer victims?”

“When you are born into this world, the best thing you can do is leave this world a better place, and this is kind of ‘paying it forward’ to me. If I can change those statistics? Then I will have left the world a better place for my kids and grand kids” - Bonnie J. Addario

(The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation’s Walk/Run begins at 4:30pm in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco with the starting point at the band shell between the Academy of Science and DeYoung Museum.)

photo credit x-ray image of a chest. Both sides of the lungs are visible with a growth on the left side of the lung, which could be lung cancer.  source: National Cancer Institute author: unknown date: May 1988

photo credit: JAMES HALL PHOTOGRAPHY
web:  88zero.com

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