A time-tested veteran of the nonprofit world, Nancy Torrison was hired in 2012 as the initial executive director of the Minnesota-based A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation. She has been there ever since.
Unlike other cancers, it is not easy to get in front of lung cancer. Although the situation has improved and continues to improve, it is still difficult for people to get a lung cancer screening. As a result, when people are diagnosed with lung cancer, they are already at Stage III or Stage IV.
Nancy says one of the challenges facing lung cancer in general is a very unfortunate stigma attached to the disease, both by the medical community and the general public. Specifically, many people think that lung cancer is a disease tied to cigarette smoking, when Nancy says between 50 and 60 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers. Not only are those diagnosed with the disease addressed their being diagnosed is their fault, but because the medical community fails to take this statistic into consideration, it is more difficult for someone seeking a screening to get one, and/or what are actually lung cancer symptoms get misdiagnosed as something else.
Because of the possibility of misdiagnosis, Nancy recommends to anyone who has symptoms associated with cancer to get a low-dose CT scan. She tells the story of a woman who suffered from fatigue and shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed her with depression. Upon further review months later, they determined she had Stage IV lung cancer, and she died not long after that.
Nancy Torrison emphasizes the low-dose CT scan is the gold standard of lung cancer screening. She says research has shown that a chest x-ray does not provide the comprehensive data shown by the low-dose CT scan. Nancy laments that not enough people are eligible for a low-dose CT scan, but with more funding and more research, in years to come that statistic will improve.
While cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer, so, too, is radon. It is a gas in the soil one can neither see nor smell, but it can seep into one’s home whether the structure is new or old. Nancy urges one to go to a hardware and purchase a radon test kit for like $10. If you tack it to a wall in your home’s lower level, and leave it there for three or four days, you can then send it off to a lab to see if your home needs radon mitigation. That’s the procedure that can ultimately remove radon from the home, but it can be as much as a few thousand dollars.
Nancy Torrison says upon diagnosis, a patient well-educated on the subject has the best chance for survival. She recommends the website https://www.youandlungcancer.com. It has a wealth of information for people of all age group and diagnoses. As part of that education process, she also recommends one enquire about comprehensive biomarker testing. Because of tremendous advances in this field over the last decade, precise therapies can be found for those diagnosed with lung cancer, especially non-small cell lung cancer. Nancy says for the person diagnosed with lung cancer, if that person is at a facility that turns down a request for comprehensive biomarker testing, to find another facility.
The A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation exists to try and save lives and prevent the number of diagnoses around the country, knowing that 70 percent of the diagnoses are in Stage III or Stage IV. A lot of the work the Foundation does is with an eye toward increasing early detection, a big problem in lung cancer.
Nancy Torrison says if you are diagnosed with lung cancer to educate yourself and always be your one advocate.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Bruce Morton: Greetings and welcome to the Cancer Interviews podcast. Thanks for joining us. I’m your host, Bruce Morton. Our guest is Nancy Torrison of Minnetonka, Minnesota. She’s the Executive Director of the A Breath of Hope Lung Cancer Foundation, and she is going to educate us about the many pieces of the lung cancer journey. So, here she is, Nancy Torrison, and Nancy, welcome to Cancer Interviews.
Nancy Torrison: Thank you for having me.
BM: Glad to have you. Nancy, the first thing we want to do is learn about the chain of events that led to your position with A Breath of Hope.
NT: I started my career in corporate America and was an executive in corporate America, then took a few years off to raise my four children, and when I came back, I stepped into the non-profit world, and pretty much wore every hat in the non-profit world. I did PR, I did marketing and communications, I did fundraising and finance, and when A Breath of Hope was looking for its first executive director back in 2012, I actually got recruited by one of their board members for this position. So, I made the change and joined the Foundation in November of 2012 and have been here ever since. When I came in, the organization was still in startup stage, so they were an organization that did not have programs, but they did have a really clear-cut mission with three very distinct goals for fighting lung cancer; so that’s where I stepped in and developed the programming and the brand from there.
BM: And we are going to talk about that three-pronged approach a bit later on, but I would have to say from a distance it sounds as though you found, and find, your work with the Foundation to be very fulfilling.
NT: I love it. I actually lost my aunt to lung cancer a couple decades ago now, but she happened to be a smoker, and I know that lots of non-smokers lose their lives to lung cancer, but she happened to be a smoker. When I was sitting with her in hospice, you know in her final days, she told me that she deserved to die because she couldn’t kick the smoking habit. I remember arguing with her. She was just this beautiful light in the world, and she was still pretty young, in her seventies. I just remember arguing with her that she didn’t deserve to die just because she had this one habit, and so it always stuck with me. When this organization asked me to consider being their executive director, I had two other job offers, but I could not get this lung cancer out from under my skin. It had already embedded itself in my psyche, and I was still mad about my aunt had said to me on her death bed and the way that the world really views smokers and the way the world views lung cancer patients whether they smoked or not.
BM: That is a nice segue that leads into one of the many things I wanted to talk about, and that is this stigma you referenced that is attached to those diagnosed with lung cancer. How inaccurate is it and in a collective sense, how much damage does it do?
NT: That is the most important thing you could ask today, Bruce, because the stigma, it is inaccurate, but it is also really unkind. Being a person that grew up in a time in which we really understood that smoking is unhealthy, you know, in the sixties and seventies, so when I was growing up in the seventies, there was a lot of blame that was assigned to smokers, rather than looking at the tobacco companies that are targeting people and communities and children and things like that, so I was part of understanding that smoking isn’t good for our health, but in our country, I think we did it wrong. I think we created a stigma that attached itself really unfortunately to lung cancer patients, so the stigma that it is a smoker’s disease, first of all, that’s inaccurate because we have more than half the people that are diagnosed each year are non-smokers when they are diagnosed. It is considered 50 to 60 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers when they are diagnosed. So, some used to smoke, but a lot smoked a long time ago and some never smoked. The figure we like to use is around 20 percent are those who have never smoked, another 30 to 35 percent are former smokers, some of them having smoked really when they were younger and not for a very long time. So, when we talk about everybody saying that lung cancer is a smoker’s cancer, it is just inaccurate; but the rest of it is the stigma that is inaccurate, there is also a very unkind innuendo that our lung cancer patients hear all the time, and it doesn’t happen with other diseases. They always get the question, “Well, did you smoke?”, and it is the way that it is said, the implication that somehow, they deserved to be sick, and they deserved to die because they had this habit. So, what we are trying to do as an organization, and what similar organizations are trying to do across the country is undo that stigma that came about when we were teaching people to quit smoking, and just look at it differently because lung cancer is like other cancers. Anybody with lungs can get lung cancer. It is true that the number one cause is smoking and secondhand smoke, but anybody can get lung cancer, and until the world and our country understands that, we are going to have a very difficult time really diagnosing non-smokers, which is what’s happening right now.
BM: I also wanted to mention that there are some disparate symptoms of lung cancer, symptoms that at first blush wouldn’t seem to indicate lung cancer. Can you share some of those symptoms with us?
NT: Whether you are or are not a candidate for lung cancer, so whether you do or do not feel as though you have risk factors, I am speaking about smokers versus non-smokers, what you have to be thinking about is understanding the symptoms is important to your health and your family’s health. So, do you need to understand the common symptoms or the uncommon symptoms? It doesn’t really matter. You have to advocate for yourself because non-smoker after non-smoker that comes into our office, their symptoms were misdiagnosed. So, when you talk to somebody who has been misdiagnosed with lung cancer, a lot of them didn’t have any really noticeable lung cancer symptoms and any kind of symptoms, really, but a lot of people did have symptoms. They had shortness of breath, they had a cough that wouldn’t go away, they had a little blood when they coughed, they had sore shoulders, sore joints. You know, there are just some unusual symptoms that a lot of people with lung cancer have named after they were diagnosed. Unfortunately, the common symptoms of lung cancer really mimic asthma and they mimic bronchitis, so quite often for the non-smoker when they go in with these symptoms, they’ll be diagnosed with something other than lung cancer and they won’t be checked for lung cancer and that can go on for months. I guess the longer you go without diagnosis of a cancer, the more time it has to grow, so I think people have to advocate for themselves, they have to know things like severe fatigue, that is not something that you should overlook. If you feel really tired and you can’t explain it and you have been really tired for weeks, that’s a symptom of cancer and it’s a symptom of a lot of other things, too, but you just have to be persistent in pursuing your physician and pursuing tests. The low-dose CT scan is what we recommend for lung cancer diagnosis, and if you are a smoker, especially if you have been a heavy smoker at any point in your life over the last 15 to 20 years, you do need to get a low-dose CT scan if any of these symptoms last more than two to four weeks. We just don’t like to hear that people have had their symptoms for six, nine, 12 weeks. A good story to share is that our board chair’s mom, she was a healthy young woman. She had this severe fatigue, she had shortness of breath, but they actually diagnosed her with depression and for several months, she was thought to be depressed and that why they thought she had this fatigue and these other symptoms and when they finally pursued it, it turned out she had Stage Four lung cancer and she died not too long after that. So, she was completely misdiagnosed. We hear stories like that a lot at our foundation, so we just really want to encourage people that if you have symptoms that last more than two to four weeks, really you need to dig deeper and you need to advocate for yourself and make sure your care team is thinking about your whole body and your lungs.
BM: Nancy, you had mentioned the low-dose CT scan, but we should not confuse that with a lung cancer screening. Is the screening still the gold standard in terms of lung cancer diagnosis?
NT: It’s really important to understand the difference between preventive screening and a CT scan. All of the research that’s been done recently shows that a chest x-ray isn’t the right test if you suspect lung cancer. The right test to do is the low-dose CT scan, and it is the gold standard for preventive lung cancer screening, but it’s important to understand that preventive screening, like with any other cancer, means you have no symptoms, you aren’t sick, you are just a candidate, or you have some risk factors for a cancer. You get screened because you don’t have any symptoms. Now, if you have symptoms like a cough or you are spitting up blood, something like that, then it becomes a scan versus a screen. It’s a different process and a different way of coding within the medical system, but it’s important to know the difference because screening is always for people that are not experiencing symptoms. Unfortunately, in the lung cancer world, the only people that can receive preventive screening are people with heavy smoking histories, 20 packs and they are over the age of 50, and those are expanded guidelines, and we are thrilled that the guidelines are expanded, but almost everybody I meet do not fit those guidelines and they would never be eligible for lung cancer screenings, so they have to wait until they have symptoms to receive a low-dose CT scan. I can name a family we work with all the time. Grandpa died of lung cancer, dad died of lung cancer, this was a mixture of smokers and non-smokers in their family, uncle died of lung cancer, uncle’s sister died of lung cancer, it is prevalent in their family, again it’s non-smokers and smokers. Their generation now that is in their forties and fifties, they would like to be screened, but they are all ineligible. They cannot pay for it; their doctor has to refer them to a lung cancer screening program because they are not over the age of 50 with a heavy smoking habit. So, think about other cancers. Think about how colonoscopies work and how mammograms work and prostate and ovarian. We are preventatively screened for a lot of cancers, but the world’s deadliest cancer, lung cancer, does not have a screening tool that is available to everybody. It is only available to, again, those heavier smokers over the age of 50, and if those people who are over the age of 50 and have that smoking history and who are eligible for screened right now, would get screened, we would save tens of thousands of lives each year. Unfortunately, it is thought that only eight to ten percent of those people that are eligible for screening are choosing to be screened, so, even though we have a screening tool for a certain small percentage of our lung cancer community, they are not getting screened. As a result, we have a lot of problems in this field. We have a problem with uptake for those who are eligible, and we have a problem with our guidelines and our tool, which is the low-dose CT scan being very limited and available to only a small percentage of the people will get lung cancer in the next five to ten years.
BM: Nancy, I am asking you look into your lung cancer crystal ball here, but can you imagine in my lifetime, in your lifetime, a scenario in which screening will be available for far more people than it is today?
NT: I feel really good about it right now because it was just recently that the USPSTF, the US Preventive Services Task Force, just expanded their screening guidelines from age 55 to age 50, and from a 30-pack history to a 20-pack history, so the work we are doing collectively as lung cancer advocates across the country, is savings lives if we can get those people who are eligible to choose to be screened. I feel good about it, I feel we are moving in the right direction. I think the low-dose CT scan is thought to have enough risks that they will never offer it to the general population like we do with a mammogram. I don’t agree with that personally, but I am also not a doctor. I think that what we will find is that blood-based screening and other kinds of early detection tools will become more prevalent in the US, and I know a lot of those are in the works right now, some of them are in clinical trials right now. I think more attention is being paid to lung cancer than has been paid to it in the past. I think people are waking up to the fact that it is not just a smoker’s disease and I think that as we crush the stigma and sort of re-educate America about this disease, I think that we will see more interest and more attention and more funding and a more preventive screening tool.
BM: Nancy, here is another piece to the lung cancer equation. It is something that exists where you live in Minnesota and it exists where I live in Colorado, and that is radon. What is it and how can contribute to a lung cancer diagnosis?
NT: That is so important, Bruce, that is such an important question. Here in Minnesota, we have very high rates of radon in our soils, and that is true in a lot of states. Here is what is really sad about this. It is believed that radon is the number one cause of lung cancer in non-smokers and you know, what’s sad about that is that radon is a gas in the soil. It seeps up into new houses, old houses, it doesn’t matter. It looks for cracks and crevices and gets into people’s homes, starting in the lower levels, and it is able to get in, eventually. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, there’s no way to know if you have radon in your house or in school or in your church unless you actually test for it. Here’s the thing that is really sad: You pick up a radon test kit at your nearby hardware store for like $10. I am going to admit that the first I tried out a radon test kit, I screwed it up. I didn’t follow the directions, but they really are pretty simple to use. You buy the kit, you rip it open, you tack it up to a wall on your home’s lower level, and you let it hang on your wall for three or four days. Then you package it back up, you mail it off to a lab and then the lab will post your results in a week to ten days. If your results are getting a reading over four, at that point you need to talk to a radon expert and consider having your house mitigated and getting the radon removed from your house. It’s a simple system, but kind of expensive, which is a deterrent. It could be a couple thousand dollars. They just put in kind of a fan system that pulls the radon out of the house and blows it outside. Sadly, I just had to do this recently. We’ve been living in a new house for the past two years and about a year ago I finally tested the house for radon and the levels that came back were 12 to 15, which is actually pretty dangerous. I called the mitigation company and they came out and got the same readings I got with my little $10 kit, and we paid them to do a mitigation. Now our has levels of between one and two which is considered mostly safe. So, I just want to encourage your listeners to go out and but a $10 kit, hang it up in your lower level. I ended up buying a longer term radon monitoring device that cost a couple hundred dollars and I have moved it around my house, but if you’re the lower level of your home and you have it there, then you have it in your other levels. It just gets less concentrated as it moves up. I really encouraging getting that inexpensive kit, and it can prevent lung cancer. I have two women that work at the Foundation, both with Stage Four lung cancer, both never smokers, both diagnosed in their forties, and both found radon in their houses after they had been diagnosed Stage Four, so I really, really encourage people to take that simple step. Check your house once a year, buy your $10 kit and just make sure your family isn’t breathing radon every day.
BM: Now, I want to move on to a part of this equation that deals with people who have already been diagnosed. There could some potential obstacles that I can encounter when dealing with insurance companies. What are those obstacles and what can the well-educated consumer do about them?
NT: The most important thing that I could say to a newly-diagnosed lung cancer patient is to first of all, visit the website, www.youandlungcancer.com, and really educate yourself and your diagnosis. The site was developed so someone from any age level, any education level can understand their diagnosis and how to participate in their decisions about their care. So, there are two things I would recommend: Educate yourself because there are numerous studies showing that the well-educated patient lives longer and lives better. So, you need to be somebody that educates yourself to the best of your ability. There are lots of resources out there, and www.youandlungcancer.com is just one of them. The second thing I would say is to make sure you ask about comprehensive biomarker testing. There have just been unbelievable advances in the past five or ten years and most of them are around finding treatments and very precise therapies for people who have biomarkers. So, when you are diagnosed with lung cancer and especially non-small cell lung cancer, you need to receive comprehensive biomarker testing and you need to be patient and wait for the results of that test because those tests, if they identify a biomarker, a mutation, there are beautiful therapies that have just come through the pipeline in the last five years that are really, really successful in treating certain types of lung cancer. Sadly, comprehensive biomarker testing is not offered consistently from provider to provider, so at the Foundation, we educate patients and families to understand that when you get a lung cancer diagnosis, when you are past the shock of this horrific news, educate yourself, know everything you can about your lung cancer and make sure that you have received this comprehensive biomarker testing to find out if you have a mutation that could lead to a very precise medicine and therapy that is specifically designed for your lung cancer diagnosis. I have two people who work at A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation, and both of them had mutations that led them to treatments that, even thought they were both given a year to live, one of them is at five years, the other at eight or nine now, with Stage Four lung cancer, so we just have to make sure that testing takes place and if you are in a facility that turns down your request for comprehensive biomarker testing, find another facility.
BM: Nancy, we are going to start to wrap things up, but this is the time in which we want to learn more about A Breath of Hope, and along those lines, I have two questions. First, for the person who has learned they could be a candidate for lung cancer, how can the Foundation help?
NT: We have a mission to fight lung cancer and to try and save lives and prevent the number of diagnoses that we see every year in this country, but more particularly, we know 70 percent of diagnoses are in Stage Three or Four. It is a lot tougher to beat lung cancer when you are in Stage Three or Four than when you are in Stage One, so a lot of the work we do is in the early detection phase, a big problem in lung cancer. Sometimes symptoms are subtle, sometimes people just refuse to recognize their symptoms, sometimes their doctors miss their symptoms and think of them as something else, a lot of reasons for this, the stigma is part of it. We need to start finding lung cancer earlier. If you think about breast cancer, the breast cancer survival rate is over 90 percent now. Guess why? Because 65 to 70 percent of American women receive mammograms and breast cancer is being found in early stages when it is still treatable. The survival rate for lung cancer is under 21 percent. That’s because we are finding in Stage Three and Four. We need a lot of focus on early detection and a lot of has to do with removing the stigma and then we remove the stigma, the three program areas that A Breath of Hope focuses on, which is not unusual for a lung cancer organization, we focus on research, improved dollars for research. Why would there be more spending on breast cancer than there is on lung cancer when lung cancer kills almost twice as many women as breast cancer every year. Lung cancer? Almost twice as many dying from lung cancer as breast cancer every year. Why would we not be spending dollar for dollar per cancer death more money on lung cancer? So, that’s a problem. We have to address that. A Breath of Hope funds lung cancer research and we have a very competitive process. We think we are funding some of the best science in the world right now. Our competitive process starts with our brilliant local research committee, we have got about 12 physicians and patient advocates in that group. We also have a national advisory committee, all of that is on our website, our Research page, I think that we have a competitive research program that funds some of the best research in the country and the research we fund is called translational research and that is the research that is really, really important for patients because translational research means that it should reach the patient in about five years, which means that’s the science that takes place right before the clinical trial. We need more of that in lung cancer, so that is one of our three program areas. Lung cancer patients have some of the highest levels of anxiety and depression. They deal with a stigma and with unkind comments. They have in a lot of cases a poor prognosis. So, we need better support mechanisms and more non-judgmental, compassionate people who care for lung cancer patients than we’ve had in the past. When you start working with hundreds of lung cancer patients every year and you start hearing their stories, you know they deal with some really cruel remarks and they are also fighting for their lives. So, one of our programs is our patient family program. We try to overcome some of those barriers to make their journey a little bit less stressful. We provide rides so that nobody refuses to go to treatment because they lack transportation. We provide companionship visits to help lung cancer patients feel less isolated and they talk to somebody else who has been through the cancer journey. We provide support groups for survivors that can talk to each other and our support groups are educational so that we always teach about an important topic. We even have grief support groups right now because 80 percent of our people are not making it through the lung cancer journey and leave a lot of devastated family members behind, so that whole patient and family support group is necessary because it’s lung cancer, because of the stats I have mentioned. Then our third program area is education and we educate patients with youandlungcancer.com, and we educate patients through the Midwest Lung Cancer Summit, both just really important vehicles for making sure that we do our part in helping lung cancer patients absorb as much information as they can; relevant, new information. It changes every year, it’s a crazy field. So, we make sure that at the Midwest Lung Cancer Summit in November and then the ongoing support groups, every patient if they want to be well-informed, they can be. So, I really, really recommend that patients take that on themselves and educate themselves so that when they to their next doctor’s appointment, they can participate in decisions about their treatment and their care. The rest of that education piece is community awareness. This is a major public health issue in the US. Lung cancer is, I think, the number one public health issue. It is right up there with COVID, and that’s because we don’t have preventive screening tools and we don’t have a population that understands that even if you quit smoking 20 years ago, you can still get lung cancer. Even if you never smoked, you can get lung cancer. This is a public health issue when your community, your society does not understand that they are at risk for this disease. So, a lot of what we are do are events, community gatherings and public speaking and marketing campaigns, we push materials across the US and the other lung cancer organizations do this as well. It’s really important to re-educate America so that we as a people understand that anybody can get lung cancer. If you have lungs, you can have lung cancer. You need to pay attention.
BM: Nancy, I was going to ask about how the Foundation helps those who have already been diagnosed, but you have pretty much covered that; so I will substitute my second Foundation-related question with the following. In the Foundation’s early days, you deal with people in the Twin Cities are and elsewhere in Minnesota; but with the pandemic, Zoom and the Internet, I can only imagine your scope has expanded. Can you share with us how A Breath of Hope reaches people with a wider reach?
NT: That’s such a great question because as non-profits have had to pivot during COVID. We used to have physical, face-to-face support groups. It just seems so foreign now after going through COVID. Those physical support groups limited us to dealing with the people who lived in the Twin Cities. When COVID came along, we opened up the meetings and they became virtual Zoom meetings and they are going great. We have had great attendance and we have had people coming in from other parts of the country, so you are absolutely correct, we will never opt for strictly physical meetings, so have pivoted on a grand scale and we opened up ourselves up, all of our family and patient programming, we have opened it up to anybody who wants to be part of it. Now, youandlungcancer.com, which is our patient education site, that one went global back in 2017, its first year. We have patients and physicians and caregivers using that site, all told, 300,000 visits to that site from 35 countries. So, that one was designed to be online and what we had to do was audience generation globally, we had to just push it hard so that the English product was available to anybody that wanted it and we redesigned it in Spanish. That program has been global for about four years now. Our research program has always been national. We take our applications and proposals, whenever we have an RFD, they are open to anyone who works for a US research institution, so that’s always been a national program. Then our patient and family program has always been local until the pandemic. Now because of the online access, it’s really available to anybody.
BM: Nancy, that’s a wealth of information. I would think that if any watchword stands out above all others, it would be: education.
NT: Right. That’s it. That is the way we are going to stop people from getting late stage lung cancer diagnoses. It is going to be awareness and education and it is going to be expanding lung cancer screening with whatever tool works. It’s the world’s number one cancer killer. We need to be screening people for it. We just have to be working hard and spending the dollars that are necessary to find the tool or improve on the tool we are using now so that can screen more people for lung cancer.
BM: She is Nancy Torrison of Minnetonka, Minnesota, the executive director of the A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation, and Nancy, before we go, is there is a web address through which one can contact A Breath of Hope?
NT: Yes, it’s www.abreathofhope.org is our website, and I think whether you are somebody who wants to learn about how to prevent lung cancer or somebody that already has lung cancer, abreathofhope.org has a wealth of information to teach about lung cancer, and that is where I would direct people, and, thank you, Bruce.
BM: Nancy, thanks so much, and that’s going to wrap things up for this segment of Cancer Interviews. We hope what you have heard can be of help to you or a loved one, so until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.
Additional Resources:
SHOW NOTES
TITLE: Nancy Torrison, Executive Director, A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation – Minnetonka, Minnesota, USA
It is difficult to get a screening for lung cancer and for those who are diagnosed, they often face a cruel and inaccurate stigma. Those are just some of the obstacles attached to a lung cancer journey, which are addressed in detail by Nancy Torrison, executive director of the Twin Cities-based A Breath of Hope Lung Foundation.
Additional Resources:
Nelson Trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1911793
USPSTF Guidelines: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/lung-cancer-screening
Time Stamps:
04:04 Unfair stigma linked to lung cancer.
10:32 Unlikely symptoms that could lead to lung cancer.
11:40 The difference between a low-dose CT scan and a lung cancer screening.
13:03 The narrow parameters that make one eligible for a lung cancer screening.
15:57 Nancy believes in the future, more people will be eligible for a lung cancer screening.
17:55 How radon can lead to lung cancer.
22:55 If you are diagnosed with lung cancer, when it comes to dealing with insurance companies, educate yourself and insist on comprehensive biomarker testing.
26:34 Nancy explains how the A Breath of Hope Lung Cancer Foundation can offer preventive lung cancer support.
33:43 Nancy says A Breath of Hope helps people all over the world.
KEYWORDS (Tags):
lung cancer
cancer
low-dose ct scan
cancer interviews
radon
comprehensive biomarker testing
bruce morton
nancy torrison
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