I'm passionate about making a difference in increasing the quality of life and survivorship for all affected by lung cancer, having lost my mother and grandmother to this terrible disease.
If you just do a Google search and type in 'smoking' or 'lung cancer', you will be barraged with never ending facts and numbers, like how one in every three Americans is affected by lung disease and how COPD is the third leading cause of death and if you get lung cancer the odds are 95% that you will die.
Many physical illnesses are associated with depression and anxiety, including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, stroke, kidney disease, lung disease, dementia and cancer.
Surgery for early stage non-small cell lung cancer is standard treatment and is likely curative. Yet, fewer blacks than whites undergo surgery for the disease, leading to a higher mortality rate among blacks with lung cancer.
Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases. Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective.
When we think about lung cancer, the biggest environmental factor is without doubt smoking. Um, that would make a huge impact and has made a huge impact on the incidence of lung cancer. We have to keep pushing that and making it clear to everybody why smoking is so dangerous.
There was one point where my mother was dying of lung cancer, and a journalist dressed up as a nurse and got in the house to get a picture of her, dying of lung cancer and stuff like that, and then you realise the fame's not all it's cracked up to be.
I am involved with so many charitable organizations. Lung Cancer because of my dad, Breast Cancer because as a woman and mother of two daughters I have to be, Lupus for my sister, Crohn's disease for a dear friend, as well as Oceana and The Plastic Pollution Coalition because we have to be responsible to save the planet!
The decrease in incidents of death from cancer is largely attributable to new medicines or therapeutics. Perhaps a third is attributable to changing our environment, and that includes of course smoking which I believe accounted for probably 20 percent of deaths from, certainly from lung cancer, more than that from lung cancer, but from cancer overall.
I joined forces with the American Cancer Society in 2010 as a spokesperson for the N.F.L.'s 'A Crucial Catch' campaign, which benefits the American Cancer Society. This was important to me because I lost my mother to breast cancer, and I have always felt a strong commitment to doing all I can to fight this disease.
Athletes vs Cancer is a foundation that I started in 2008 after I lost my mom to cancer in 2007, and our goal is early detection, preventative screening and just really spreading knowledge about the cancer disease.
The four most common cancers that account for about 80 percent of all cancer deaths are lung, breast, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer.
Growing up, I thought my grandfather was dead. Later, I learned he was alive, but my family pretended he didn't exist because of the terrible way he'd abused my grandmother and my mother. He did things like shave my grandmother's head and lock her in a closet. With my mother's help, my grandmother finally left him.
Cancer runs in our family. I lost my grandmother to it. There's a saying that you meet people and instantly know them. My grandmother and I had that. The first time my heart was broken was when my grandmother passed away. I was twenty-one.
I've always been very involved in anything that had to do with lung disease or cancer.
My two grandmothers both died of cancer, so I understand how painful and difficult this disease is on the entire family. My first grandmother passed away from bone cancer when I was about 10. It was really horrible. I remember the whole process like it was yesterday.