Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA) hailed today’s release of “Out of the Shadows: Women and Lung Cancer,” a groundbreaking report issued by the Mary Horrigan Connors Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

“This is the wake-up call for women,” said Laurie Fenton Ambrose, LCA President & CEO.  She called the report the most current and comprehensive ever done for the general public on lung cancer.  Fenton also congratulated Yolanda Colson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of “Out of the Shadows” and her research team for their extraordinary efforts to produce the important and timely report.

Out of the Shadows: Women and Lung Cancer, a groundbreaking report released today by the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is a call to action on women’s largest cancer challenge: lung cancer.

As an organization devoted to women’s health advocacy, education and research, the Society for Women’s health Research (SWHR) commends the efforts of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Lung Cancer Alliance for providing the most current and comprehensive report to date on the impact of lung cancer on women.

As a mother, daughter, and friend, I have spent my fair share of time in emergency rooms. It can be grueling– even when the reason for the visit is fairly trivial. A broken collar bone, a hand-full of stitches, or a tummy ache from eating too many gummy bears.

But as a caregiver for someone with end-stage cancer, those minutes can feel like hours, and hours like millennia. I can’t begin to imagine how uncomfortable those same moments feel for the one who is actually struggling with the final stages of cancer.

Thinking those same thoughts – that ER visits can be “disruptive, distressing, and exhausting” – and understanding that roughly 40% of people visit the ER in the final 2 weeks of life, researchers in Canada decided to look at the reasons why those visits happen. Could some of these reasons be avoidable?

Earlier this week, you may have seen this story on ABC News:

The Impact of Peter Jennings: Five Years Later

Lung cancer death rates have fallen since the anchor revealed his fatal illness.

As a former reporter and now lung cancer advocate, when I saw this story, I about fell out of my chair. It is grossly inaccurate on many levels.

First of all, from a journalism standpoint, the most recent comprehensive scientific lung cancer statistics available regarding death rates (and other statistics) are from 2005.

People with a high intake of vitamin K from food may be less likely to develop or die from cancer, especially prostate or lung cancer.

Vitamin K can be found in green leafy vegetables as well as in some vegetable oils, meat and cheese.

Researchers in Germany found that about one quarter of those people with the highest intakes of vitamin K were 28 percent less likely to die from cancer than those who ate less vitamin K-rich food.

Although you have been diagnosed with lung cancer anyway, you should eat more vegetables and fruits.

It is time that food will not only help you stop the cancer, but also to actively treat. Practitioners of alternative medicine have advocated for a long time vegetarian or macrobiotic diet for people with cancer including lung.

Now, traditional medicine is receiving increasing evidence that fruits and vegetables may be a good option for patients with lung cancer. Recent research shows that the substances contained in foods as beta carotene, can attack and destroy tumor cells and slow the growth and spread of tumors.

In a recent report, the Center for Research on Cancer, University of Hawaii in Honolulu, said the powers of plants chemotherapy slowed the progression and virulence of the cancer, prolonging the life span.

Still, one in 10 people with lung cancer have no smoking history. The proportion is even higher — as many as one in five — among women. Scientists at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center are focused on understanding why. One possibility is that, although lung cancers in smokers and nonsmokers develop in the same place in the body, these may be entirely different diseases at the molecular level. Different genetic abnormalities may be driving them, and they may require different treatments targeting those abnormalities.

Lange Productions announces “Be a Survivor – Lung Cancer Treatment Guide.” The book’s uniqueness is the positive, upbeat, encouraging tone that motivates and empowers lung cancer patients and their loved ones. Until now, lung cancer patients were under-informed about their options, and under-motivated to seek out cures. Many struggle under the negative stigma that their disease was self-inflicted. Physicians may approach them with less optimism, citing poor survival rates, leaving patients uninformed, and under-encouraged.

“People who contract lung cancer and who have never smoked appear to have a genetic variation in common that predisposes them to the disease,” The Times reported. It said researchers have found that a gene called GPC5 is more common in non-smokers with lung cancer than non-smokers without the disease.

Researchers say that about one-third of never smokers have this uncommon gene variant

ROCHESTER, Minn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– A five-center collaborative study that scanned the genomes of thousands of “never smokers” diagnosed with lung cancer as well as healthy never smokers has found a gene they say could be responsible for a significant number of those cancers.

In the March 22 on line issue of Lancet Oncology, the researchers reported that about 30 percent of patients who never smoked and who developed lung cancer had the same uncommon variant, or allele, residing in a gene known as GPC5. The research was co-led by scientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Minnesota, Harvard University, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Researchers found in laboratory studies that this allele leads to greatly reduced GPC5 expression, compared to normal lung tissue. The finding suggests that the gene has an important tumor suppressor-like function and that insufficient function can promote lung cancer development.