Denise Lee on her last day of chemo. In addition to chemotherapy and surgery, she was treated with immunotherapy. She is currently in remission.
Denise Lee
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Denise Lee
Denise Lee on her last day of chemo. In addition to chemotherapy and surgery, she was treated with immunotherapy. She is currently in remission.
Denise Lee
Denise Lee grew up in Detroit in the mid-1970s and attended an all-girls Catholic high school. She smoked her first cigarette at the age of 14 at school, where smoking was a popular way to try to lose weight.
Instead, her nicotine addiction lasted four decades until she quit in her mid-50s.
“At one point it was as high as 2.5 packs a day,” Lee, 62, recalls.
Yet she didn’t think about the risk of lung cancer – until she saw a billboard urging former smokers to get tested. Lee, a retired lawyer living in Fremont, California, was walking past on her way to work.
“What caught my attention was the fact that it was an African-American woman on the front,” she recalls.
She eventually underwent the low-dose scan recommended for current and former smokers. When doctors discovered an early but dangerous tumor, Lee cried and panicked. His mother had taken care of his father, who died of prostate cancer. “My biggest concern was telling my mother,” she says.
But that was six years ago, and Lee is cancer-free today. Surgery removed the 2-inch tumor in his lung, then new treatments also boosted his immune system, fighting against any recurrence.
Lung cancer remains the deadliest form of the disease, killing an estimated 135,000 Americans a year – more than breast, prostate and colon cancers combined – which is why many people still consider a diagnosis synonymous of death sentence. But thanks to new treatments and technology, lung cancer survival rates are improving dramatically, allowing some patients with relatively advanced cancer to live years longer.
“If you’re going to get lung cancer, now is a good time,” Lee says of the advancements that saved her.
Denise Lee has been cancer free for six years. She says she is grateful to have been screened and to have detected her lung cancer early enough for treatment to be effective.
Denise Lee
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Denise Lee
Denise Lee has been cancer free for six years. She says she is grateful to have been screened and to have detected her lung cancer early enough for treatment to be effective.
Denise Lee
The biggest breakthrough, says Robert Winn, a lung cancer specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the ability to better identify mutations in a patient’s particular form of cancer. In the past, treatments were blunt tools that caused a lot of collateral damage to healthy parts of the body when treating cancer.
“We went from that to molecular characterization of your lung cancer, and that was a game changer,” Winn says. “This is where science and innovation make an impact.”
One of these revolutionary treatments is called targeted therapy. Scientists identify genetic biomarkers in mutated cancer cells to target and then deliver drugs that attack those targets, thereby shrinking the tumors.
Another solution is immunotherapy, usually taken in pill form, which stimulates the body’s defense system to identify foreign cells, then uses the power of the immune system to fight cancer as if it were ‘a virus.
As scientists identify new cancer genes, they create an ever-wider range of these drugs.
Together, these treatments have helped increase national survival rates by 22% over the past five years – a rapid improvement in a relatively short period of time, despite the fact that screening rates have been slow to increase. Winn says that as these treatments become cheaper and more readily available, the benefits are reaching even rural and black populations who face historic challenges accessing health care.
The most remarkable thing about these drugs is their ability, in some cases, to reverse advanced-stage cancers. Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, a thoracic surgeon at Harvard, remembers seeing scans where large, dark shadows of the tumor disappeared: “It was remarkable to see the lung cancer completely melt away. »
For Yang, such progress feels personal. He lost his beloved grandfather to illness while Yang was in college. If he were diagnosed today, he might still be alive.
“Helping take care of him was one of the main reasons I wanted to become a doctor,” Yang says.
But the work to fight lung cancer is far from over; Further progress in lung cancer survival depends largely on screening more people.
Low-dose CT scans are recommended annually for people over 50 who have smoked the equivalent of a pack a day for 20 years. But nationally, only 4.5% of eligible people receive these exams, compared to rates of more than 75% for mammograms.
Andrea McKee, a radiation oncologist and spokesperson for the American Lung Association, says part of the problem is that lung cancer is associated with the stigma of smoking. Patients often blame themselves for causing the disease, saying, “‘I know I did this to myself. And so I don’t think I deserve to get tested.'”
McKee says it’s a challenge unique to lung cancer. “And it puzzles me when I hear that, because, of course, no one deserves to die of lung cancer.”
Denise Lee recognizes this fear. “I was afraid of what they were going to find,” she admits. But she still urges her friends and family to get annual exams.
“I’m so grateful that my diagnosis was early, because then I had options,” she says. “I could have surgery, I could have chemotherapy, I could participate in a clinical trial.”
And it all saved his life.
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