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I Was Diagnosed With Stage 3 Lung Cancer At 28 Having Never Smoked.. Here Are The Warning Signs Young People Need To Know
When Aurora Lucas started feeling chest pain in August 2021 she initially brushed it off as stress.
She was busy. She had recently moved to Chicago to start a new teaching job and was in the second year of her doctorate program. But when the pain didn't go away, and she developed a cough, fatigue and back pain, she went to the ER.
She never imagined she'd receive the diagnosis that eventually came three months after that first hospital visit. It was advanced lung cancer — at 28 years-old. Aurora had never smoked.
It took tests conducted by three different doctors to arrive at the correct conclusion, with two dismissing her symptoms as the result of a lung infection.
'Doctors over and over and over again, were doing everything else and suspecting everything else except the word cancer,' Aurora, now 31, said in a video posted to her TikTok channel.
Mrs Lucas was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was just 28 years old. She had to give up teaching in order to get better, but was able to continue pursuing her Doctor of Education degree. Now, at 31, she is entering the dissertation phase of the program.
Now, as she recovers from treatment, she wants to raise awareness of the signs of the disease, and remind others that no one is immune — no matter their age.
'The scary thing is, this is a hidden disease, you know it doesn't get diagnosed until much later until stage three or four and usually its pretty aggressive,' Aurora said.
Aurora's story comes amid a global increase in early-onset cancers, with growing numbers of patients being diagnosed under 50.
Early onset cancer of all forms have risen by 79 percent from 1990 to 2019 globally, according to an analysis published in the journal BMJ Oncology.
Though these rates are surging most in colorectal and breast cancer, some measures suggest that under age 40 lung cancer cases are on the rise too.
Over the past few decades, lung cancer rates have dropped in almost all demographics, except for people younger than 40.
Only 1.4 percent of all people with lung cancer are diagnosed under 35 years old, roughly 3000 Americans.
However, when the disease does hit young people, it is often diagnosed at later stages when treatments are less effective.
By the time Aurora's cancer was spotted, the cancer had spread lymph nodes, and was classified as stage three.
About 37 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer at this stage live for five years after their diagnosis.
The symptoms began in August 2021. They included chest pain, persistent coughing and back pain. She also developed fatigue that was so severe that she had to stop driving, fearing falling asleep at the wheel.
'Those were huge signs that I thought was just stress as a 28 year old,' she said.
She made an appointment to see her primary care doctor shortly after. He told her she looked great and recommended she eat some honey for her cough.
About a week later, her chest pain hadn't subsided, so she went to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a rare condition that affects the way the heart is wired, called wolf parkinson's white syndrome.
At this point, doctors took a scan of her chest, and saw 'a haze' that they thought maybe was an infection or tuberculosis.
But her insurance wouldn't cover further testing, so doctors sent her home. Three weeks later, she returned to the emergency room because the coughing was getting worse, and she could hardly talk.
She had to 'beg' the nurse to let her perform further testing, offering to pay for the expensive scans since insurance wouldn't cover it, Aurora shared on a podcast called Patient from Hell.
The nurse performed a biopsy, which came back inconclusive, and she was sent back home.
Finally, on December 1st 2021, her insurance changed, and she went to a new doctor who flagged her case as urgent, sending her for a barrage of testing.
Within five days she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
'So many doctors were in denial that this was actually lung cancer,' she said.
This came as a shock to her and her family, she had never smoked, and though her grandmother developed the disease, it wasn't until she was in her 60's.
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AdvertisementShe was recommended two rounds of chemotherapy and 30 days of radiation.
That initial stage concluded in February 2022, and she was shortly thereafter put on a medication that was tailored to treat her particular type of cancer.
She was told by her doctors that the unnamed oral therapy, which she's still taking today, is like a 'cancer police'.
She gets scanned every three months to make sure the cancer hasn't progressed.
At any point, the medication could stop keeping her cancer in check, and she could find out that her cancer is back, she said.
Despite that looming concern, she leads an active busy life. She's now entering the dissertation phase of her doctorate, and spends time travelling with family while performing patient advocacy online.
On TikTok, she answers questions viewers have about lung cancer and explains the importance of regular screening, since for many people, symptoms don't begin until the disease is very advanced.
Especially for young people, Mrs Lucas said: ''it's super important to get screened and get checked and be connected with your body.'
A Path After Cancer Doesn't Have To Be Linear
I used to think that having lung cancer canceled all of my life's plans, but I realized I shouldn't give it that much power.
When Knox thought about her goals and dreams, she realized the end result was what mattered most.
When I got my stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis at age 32, it was two weeks after my wedding; just seven days after my husband was deployed to South Korea. At the time, I had so many goals and dreams, and all I could think about was how I would never get to do any of them. A diagnosis tends to strip away any feelings of hope and a future. It's so easy to let go of dreams and desires out of sheer doubt and fear.
After three lung drains and with a PleurX catheter in my left lung, I slowly returned to kickboxing and felt fine! Well, fine enough. But it was then that I realized I could still do the things I wanted to do. I just need to do them differently and they may not look like what I originally expected.
I always dreamed of being a mother and with my new husband, we were excited to start discussing future plans. I felt like cancer took that from me almost immediately. It was the first goal I mourned. But possibilities outside of natural birth were presented to me, and I realized that I could still be a mother in some capacity. But was that good enough?
I began to consider what was most important to me about my goals and dreams: the process or the end result. I came to terms with the fact that it doesn't matter what the path looks like, as long as I get to where I'm trying to go. My whole world opened back up and a whole shelf of dreams, I thought I had to put away forever, became possible for me. These included motherhood, fitness, travel, weddings and careers. If I focused on that end result, how I got there didn't matter. And I have slowly been checking those bucket list boxes off my list!
Before my diagnosis, I used to think of things very linearly. Having cancer has taught me to be creative, open-minded and to always stay positive. Life doesn't have to end with cancer unless you let it. And if you truly want to do something, find a way to make it happen and it will be that much sweeter when it does. The feeling of relief I had when I finished that first kickboxing class post-diagnosis was such a rush. I felt like I was reclaiming my power and my life from this disease.
On the other side, I understand that I am incredibly blessed in my journey. A lot of things are working in my favor. And I realize that no two cancer journeys are the same. But I think if we all think of our goals from this lens, we can all achieve much more than we thought. I am a firm believer that whatever part of your life you can take back from cancer, you should. Cancer takes away so much from us and we all deserve those little victories.
My motto is, "I may have cancer, but cancer does NOT have me."
This post was written and submitted by Jaymie Knox. The article reflects the views of Knox and not of CURE®. This is also not supposed to be intended as medical advice.
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Study Links Neighborhood Violence, Lung Cancer Progression
Scientists have identified a potential driver of aggressive lung cancer tumors in patients who live in areas with high levels of violent crime. Their study found that stress responses differ between those living in neighborhoods with higher and lower levels of violent crime, and between cancerous and healthy tissues in the same individuals.
The findings are detailed in the journal Cancer Research Communications.
The study was designed to address the higher incidence of lung cancer in Black men than in white men, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign food science and human nutrition professor Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, who led the research with University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health health policy and administration professor Sage Kim, the principal investigator of the project. This disparity persists even though, on average, Black men smoke less and start smoking later in life than white men, Kim said.
In another study, Kim and her team found that Black men living in Chicago zip codes with higher violent crime rates had substantially higher levels of hair cortisol—one indicator of chronic stress—than those in areas with less violent crime.
Other studies have linked chronic exposure to stress to poorer outcomes in cancer patients, Madak-Erdogan said. But scientists' understanding of how stress "gets under the skin" to influence lung cancer prognosis is limited.
The newer analysis focused on glucocorticoids, a group of steroid hormones like cortisol.
These hormones bind to receptors that regulate the activity of other genes. Glucocorticoids and their receptors are involved in a variety of key functions, Madak-Erdogan said. They help regulate fetal and newborn lung tissue development, and play a role in metabolism, homeostasis, inflammation and immune function in this tissue.
The researchers first assessed patterns of gene expression in lung cancer tumors and in cancer-free lung tissue from patients who lived in various Chicago zip codes—some with higher or lower levels of violent crime. The team also determined where the glucocorticoid receptors were binding on DNA in those tissues.
Both analyses revealed that GR binding and gene-expression patterns were different in healthy versus tumor tissues, and that the patterns also differed by a patient's zip code. Overall, GR binding was highest in people who lived in high-violence areas. But within the tumor tissues, those living in high-crime zip codes had lower GR binding. They also had lower levels of GR-regulated genes in the tumor tissues.
The analyses also revealed that, within tumors, the GRs were activating genes for enzymes that degrade cortisol. This accounted for the lower cortisol levels—thus lower GR binding—in the tumors than in normal lung tissue. The lower cortisol levels were likely influencing the overall behavior of the receptors in the lung cancer tumors, Madak-Erdogan said.
"In terms of the genes the receptors regulated in the tumors of individuals living in high-violence areas, they were genes related to inflammation, higher proliferation, higher growth-factor signaling, all of which will lead to the worst outcomes for lung cancer," she said. "While we didn't prove a direct relationship in this study, our findings suggest that glucocorticoids and glucocorticoid receptors are a main driver of adverse tumor outcomes in patients living with chronically high levels of environmental stress."
The study accounted for other factors, such as environmental risk and poverty, that might lead to worse health outcomes in people living in high-crime areas, Kim said. It found no consistent correlation between poverty or environmental risk and lung cancer in the neighborhoods of interest.
Prior to the new study, scientists suspected that stress hormones played a role in cancer or other health disparities, Madak-Erdogan said. He added, "But we didn't know the exact role they play, or how they work to drive lung cancer progression. I think this study really crystallizes the idea that it's not just that individuals in these areas are more stressed. It's also that their stress responses are dysregulated. There is a direct effect of these hormones on the normal cellular physiology."
More information: The effect of exposure to neighborhood violence on glucocorticoid receptor signaling in lung tumors, Cancer Research Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-24-0032/745974
Citation: Study links neighborhood violence, lung cancer progression (2024, June 24) retrieved 30 June 2024 from https://medicalxpress.Com/news/2024-06-links-neighborhood-violence-lung-cancer.Html
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