Most people with lung cancer don’t have symptoms until the disease is advanced.
4 min read
In the US, young and middle-aged women are being diagnosed with lung cancer at higher rates than men. Susan Wojcicki, the late CEO of YouTube, had a message for the world just weeks before she passed.
“Although lung cancer overall is decreasing because of declines in tobacco use, lung cancer among people who have never smoked has been rising significantly,” Wojcicki wrote in a YouTube blog that was posted Monday.
Wojcicki, a tech pioneer who was one of Google’s earliest employees, died in August after living with lung cancer for two years. She was 56. In her YouTube blog, she calls for more resources investing in lung cancer research, especially in women and nonsmokers. The blog was written in the weeks before her death, according to YouTube, which posted it with the permission of her family.
“At the end of 2022, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I had almost no symptoms and was running a few miles a day at the time. I had never smoked so I was totally shocked with this diagnosis,” Wojcicki wrote.
“Having cancer hasn’t been easy. As a person I have changed a lot, and probably the most important lesson I have learned is just to focus and enjoy the present,” she wrote. “Life is unpredictable for everyone, with many unknowns, but there is a lot of beauty in everyday life. My goals going forward are to enjoy the present as much as possible and fight for better understanding and cures for this disease.”
Wojcicki was not alone in her lung cancer journey. A trend has emerged in the United States of more young and middle-age women being diagnosed with lung cancer at higher rates than men.
And although cigarette smoking is the No. 1 risk factor for lung cancer, many of these young women being diagnosed have never smoked. It’s estimated that about two-thirds of lung cancer cases in never-smokers are in women.
‘It was very shocking … totally unexpected’
Jhalene Mundin, a 36-year-old nurse based in New Jersey, has never smoked, and her doctor described her as otherwise healthy, with no risk factors. Yet last year, the mother of two received the shock of her life. She was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, an advanced stage of disease in which it had spread outside her lungs. Her eyes still fill with tears when she thinks about that day. “I remember I was crying,” Mundin said of her diagnosis.
“I thought it was maybe stage II or III. But when she said it was stage IV, I felt like the room was closing in on me. And I remember saying ‘No, no,’ because I was thinking about my kids,” she said. “I was like, ‘No, I can’t die yet, because I have two kids that I need to raise. They still need me.’”
Before Mundin’s diagnosis, she had had a persistent cough that was getting worse – but she thought it may have been a lingering symptom from a case of Covid-19.
However, she had an appointment on her calendar to get an X-ray of her hip due to hip pain.
“My friend, who is also my co-worker, she was like, ‘You’re already getting an X-ray of your hip. Why don’t you get a chest X-ray?’” Mundin said.
“And so the doctor gave me a script for both,” she said. “Then the chest X-ray showed a big mass. The persistent cough was from the lung cancer.”
Most people with lung cancer don’t have symptoms until the disease is advanced, but some common symptoms of lung cancer may include a persistent cough that gets worse or doesn’t go away, chest pain, shortness of breath, wheezing, coughing up blood, fatigue or weight loss.
Lung cancer ‘clearly’ climbing in nonsmokers.
Research suggests that lung cancer diagnoses have risen 84% among women in the US over the past 42 years while dropping 36% in men. Women who have never smoked are more than twice as likely as male never-smokers to get lung cancer.
“Lung cancer is clearly increasing in never-smokers,” said Dr. Helena Yu, a thoracic medical oncologist and early drug development specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
“So 20% of lung cancers that are diagnosed this year and more recently are in never-smokers – and that equates to like 40,000 cases a year,” she said. “Then 1 out of 5 people who die of lung cancer now are never-smokers, too. So we’re seeing an increased diagnosis but also a death rate that’s keeping up with that.”
She added that the youngest lung cancer patient she has treated was diagnosed at 26. That person also did not have a history of smoking.
