For the past five years, Vicky Ni has been battling lung cancer – a diagnosis that came out of the blue in 2019 after she went to a doctor for pain in her shoulder.
“He took x-rays of my neck, and it was just a coincidence that the bottom corner of the x-ray showed an elevated diaphragm,” Ni said. “I was stunned beyond words.”
The 54-year-old lawyer and mother of two is now part of a medical mystery: lung cancer in non-smokers, Asian American women had been on the rise for over a decade before Ni received her diagnosis.
“I assumed I would get chemo and beat it. It wasn’t until later, when I met an oncologist, that I learned I was stage 4 and therefore incurable,” Ni said.
Of Asian women diagnosed with lung cancer, 57% are non-smokers, according to a survey by leading medical centers in California. Of all others, only 15% of diagnosed women had no history of smoking.
Ni says she does not believe she has been exposed to cancer-causing chemicals and that she did not grow up in an area with high air pollution. As a non-smoker, she wasn’t are eligible for lung cancer screening.
“Currently, screening guidelines driving that is covered by insurance,” says epidemiologist Scarlett Gomez.
Gomez and epidemiologist Iona Cheng of the University of California San Francisco received a $12.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute.
“Some of the factors we look at include exposure to secondhand smoke. High exposure to fumes from cooking oil is an established risk factor,” Gomez said, adding that recent cellular studies suggest that a certain genetic mutation may predispose people to being more vulnerable to air pollution.
At New York University’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, Dr. Elaine Shum is randomly screening 1,000 Asian women for free.
“We definitely need a much larger study to really provide the evidence to try to change the guidelines one day so that other populations can be offered low-dose CT scans by insurance companies,” Shum said.
Possibly changing the guidelines for earlier detection will not affect the outcome for Ni and her husband David. “Like any cancer, it affects the whole family,” David said.
But it could offer hope of sparing other families the same pain in the future.
