No one was prepared for the biopsy result, which showed that the bump was actually a symptom of lung cancer that had spread to her abdomen, liver, lung, and pelvis.
“I was like, ‘Wait what, but I’ve never smoked,’” said Nunez. “It’s just so random.”
Though lung cancer diagnoses in the young are rare and data on that age group is limited, “it seems to be emerging as its own sub-type of lung cancer—one for which new powerful treatments are needed to make it a livable disease,” said Dr. Geoff Oxnard, a lung cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
In 2013, 159,480 men and women in the U.S. will die from the disease–more than those who die from breast, colon, and prostate cancer combined.
Though smoking is, by far, the greatest risk factor in developing lung cancer, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of lung cancer patients in the U.S. have never smoked. Most of these patients are women and, like Taylor and Nunez, are diagnosed at a younger age than the typical lung cancer patient.
“Young lung cancer patients we see are also more likely to be Stage IV at diagnosis. By the time their disease is discovered they are already pretty sick,” Oxnard said.
Seventy-five percent of patients with lung cancer have advanced disease and a five-year survival rate of only 5 percent.
“In older patients, the disease is often diagnosed incidentally through a scan or x-ray performed for some other reason,” Oxnard explains. “But in the young, who are otherwise healthy and not as integrated into the medical system, symptoms, if there are any, are often ignored or mistaken for something else.”