Lung Cancer a Woman's Disease
Women Against Lung Cancer Warn of the Danger
Go4Women

It is a little known fact that lung cancer kills more women each year than breast cancer. In fact, lung cancer kills more women than breast, uterine, and cervical cancer combined. Surprised? Many people are.

Women Against Lung Cancer, a newly formed organization dedicated to reducing the threat of lung cancer, says one reason is that lung cancer is often perceived as a man's disease. "Women just don't think about lung cancer as a risk to their health," says Dr. Joan Schiller, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I treat lung cancer patients all the time who got mammograms every year but ignored their constant cough."

While in no way does Dr. Schiller wish to downplay women's risks of breast cancer, she is frustrated by the lack of attention to lung cancer research. "Lung cancer, the biggest cancer killer in this country, receives ten times less funding per death than breast cancer research, and 30 times less per death than HIV/AIDS research. It gets frustrating to tell patients that I have run out of treatment options for them. Something needs to be done," said Dr. Schiller.
Dr. Schiller and her colleagues decided themselves to change the status quo by forming Women Against Lung Cancer.

WALC is dedicated to raising awareness of the lung cancer epidemic in women, increasing funding for research, expanding research into sex differences in lung cancer, and training more professionals to treat lung cancer patients.

Screening and treatment
Getting people to quit smoking, or better yet, never start, is the primary way to decrease the death toll. But lung cancer is something we must contend with, here and now, for current, former, and never-smokers.
Currently, there is no single, accepted screening technique to catch lung cancers early.

We have mammograms to detect breast cancer and Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, but for the leading cause of cancer deaths, we have very little.
A CT scan screening trial is currently underway, and shows great promise, according to Dr. Claudia Henschke, of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. But even if the trial proves it effective, we are still years away from seeing this in standard clinical practice. Until then, former and current smokers, and those with a family history of lung cancer, are on their own to ask their doctors for chest X-rays or CT scans that could save their lives.

In terms of treatment, little research has gone into lung cancer. A few new treatments recently available are unexpectedly specific, and have primarily been developed in the pharmaceutical sector. Federal funding for lung cancer research lags well behind most other diseases, and it's unlikely that major advances can be made without significant additional investments, according to Dr. Schiller.

WALC has launched a petition drive (see http://www.4walc.org/) to convince Congressional leaders federal funding for lung cancer research needs to be increased. 160,000 American lives per year hang in the balance while awaiting such progress. [PRNewswire]

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