Touched by cancer

Fundraising coffers may be fairly good indicators of our conscientiousness about battling breast cancer. Throughout Pasadena, businesses and organizations rallied throughout October — or “Pink October,” in recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month — to demonstrate their support for beating a disease that the American Cancer Society expects to have struck approximately 192,370 women by the end of this year. Despite prevention and early detection efforts, it is estimated that as many as 40,170 women will die this year from breast cancer.

Many health experts believe the ubiquitous walks, corporate sponsorships, news segments and campaigns are actually doing good, helping increase early screening and detection rates and creating a new concern for health in an era when a woman’s odds of getting cancer jump to one out of four by age 70.

“There is clearly much more awareness in the country,” said Dr. George Somlo, professor of breast oncology and co-director of the cancer program at City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer research and treatment center in Duarte. “You can’t turn on the news or read a newspaper without reading about a personalized story of new breakthrough.”

In Pasadena, residents are fortunate to live near several comprehensive cancer centers, including City of Hope, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and USC’s Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. In August, the Hill Breast Center opened on the grounds of Huntington Hospital, offering a full suite of screening and diagnostic mammography services, ultrasounds and breast MRIs through the Hill Medical Corp. Nearby, the Arcadia Radiology Medical Group is a full diagnostic imaging center where breast biopsies are done on-site. Physicians can review MRI images and audio notations from the radiologist of radiology findings, and a new program called Vision Reach, to be instituted soon, will let referring physicians make online appointments with specialists on behalf of patients, according to Marketing Director Nikki Ngo.

It is this kind of organized response to battling breast cancer that other cancer awareness groups would love to harness in their own campaigns for often deadlier, less-funded forms of the disease, some of which challenge social mores and body taboos, according to Gary Mueller, founder of Serve Marketing, a nonprofit group that offers marketing and ad services to underserved charitable causes.

“We know breast cancer gets all the awareness, but what about prostate cancer or colorectal cancer or ovarian cancer?” Mueller asked. “They’re kind of like the orphans just out there.”

November is when some cancer groups renew and redouble their efforts to get Americans geared up to fight for their cause. Lung Cancer Awareness Month, for example, aims to “break the silence” of sufferers who feel stigmatized by society, according to Laurie Carson, president and founder of the Lung Cancer Research Foundation.

A report published in the online edition of the British Medical Journal found that most of the 45 lung cancer patients between the ages of 40 and 90 in an Oxford University study said they felt others held them responsible for contracting the disease by smoking, according to a report on the American Cancer Society’s Web site.

Medical authorities believe 87 percent of lung cancer cases are attributable to smoking. But even lung cancer patients who never smoked, researchers found, felt the perception that they had caused their own illness.

“It hasn’t generated the kind of sympathy it does when people have breast cancer,” Dr. Jimmie Holland, professor and vice chair of psychiatry at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told the American Cancer Society. “It is a special stigma. The whole thing has been tainted by smoking.”

November also happens to be Prostate Cancer Awareness Month and Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. (The American Cancer Society data estimates those two types alone will account for roughly 410,000 new cancer cases this year.)

Getting Americans to receive and respond to messages about cancer prevention and building a better lifestyle is tricky, said Roshan Bastani, professor of health services and associate dean for Research in UCLA’s School of Public Health, and co-director of its Center to Eliminate Health Disparities. In fact, for all the spending and media attention rates in the post-mammography era, mortality and late-stage cancer trends still aren’t very promising.

“We’ve spent millions — billions probably — and we really haven’t made the huge advantages that we’d like to see,” Bastani said, adding that the number of women diagnosed in the latest stages of breast cancer has been fairly steady for the past 20 years.

One of those women is Holly Sears, who is currently undergoing chemotherapy for stage IV breast cancer. She thought she’d beaten it the first time around in 2005, after she’d undergone chemo, radiation and had a mastectomy at age 30, but this summer doctors discovered it had spread to both lungs. Now, the Atlanta-area legal assistant decided to seek out clinical trials that might expose her to new drugs and procedures for people who’ve had aggressive forms of cancer. She’s willing to travel as far as the West Coast and figures that with all the work being done globally, there has to be something else she could try. “I want to know all my options. This is pretty damned serious and I need to do something,” Sears said. “With all the money going into research, it seems we could have found something, a cure, by now.”

Experts tend to agree breast cancer is fairly well-funded at the federal and nonprofit levels. Last year, the National Cancer Institute awarded roughly $572.6 million to research project grants specializing in breast cancer, more than twice the funding for lung cancer-related research projects.

Some of that research highlights the importance of early detection and a proactive approach of women accessing their own individual risk, changes that in turn reduce mortality rates, said Dr. Jon M. Foran, internist and radiologist with Hill Medical Corp.

“An undisputed result of widespread adoption of mammography in the US is a decline in mortality from breast cancer, despite the steady rise in the incidence of this disease over the same period,” said Foran.

Still, City of Hope’s Somlo said most of the improvements made have been on the front end — self-exams, mammograms and preventative lifestyle changes. “The majority of progress came from early detection,” he said. “If the diagnosis is made late, even with all the bells and whistles, we will not be able to cure someone.”

Bastani attributes this grim reality to the fact that every cancer has a profile unique to the individual patient and may not respond to treatment in a predictable manner. Despite this, researchers are creating new medications and looking into tests that could help doctors determine which treatments would be most successful for a given patient, according to Dr. Cary Presant, past president of the American Cancer Society’s California Division and staff oncologist at Wilshire Oncology Medical Group. Additionally, health advocates are suggesting patients create their own form of “personalized cancer care,” in which the patient and his or her family work as a team with physicians, health professionals and support staff  to make the best health decisions possible, Presant added. “This is part of the new paradigm, the new way that oncologists treat cancer patients.”

Sears is hopeful her body will continue to respond to this round of chemo and has made up her mind to keep fighting. “It’s not just a battle — it’s a war for my life,” she said.

A marketing and advertising man with more than 25 years in the business, Mueller believes that, despite all the good press and enthusiasm for breast cancer awareness, more could be done to remind the public that it is still a fatal disease that can be stymied or averted by screening and self-advocacy. “Now there’s a saturation of the whole warm and fluffy portrayal of breast cancer,” he added. “But women still die of breast cancer.”

Getting the urgency of an illness across requires taking people outside their own comfort zone, advised Mueller. Serve Marketing has run several successful “guerilla marketing” campaigns for local groups designed to get people’s attention and make them remember to act. His team has worked for Wisconsin’s Shaken Baby Association, placing radio ads of a continuously crying baby on the air and working with hardware companies to place stickers on paint cans and other shakable items that remind men not to shake crying newborns and infants out of frustration. For four months after each campaign, not a single shaking death was reported throughout Wisconsin.

“You need to wake people up, and you’ve got to scare them sometimes,” Mueller said.

When it comes to making people uncomfortable with sobering statistics, lung cancer awareness groups seem to have the most firepower. According to the American Cancer Society’s most recent annual estimates for the US, 219,440 new lung cases were diagnosed and a staggering 159,390 deaths occurred. The five-year survival rate is a scant 15.2 percent, in part because lung cancer often goes undiagnosed until it has spread to nearby lymph nodes or metastasized even further.

“Historically, lung cancer has been a very overlooked and underfunded disease,” Carson added. “Outreach has been a hurdle due to the stigma that has surrounded the disease, but I believe attitudes are beginning to change.”

To that end, the Lung Cancer Research Foundation hopes to shift focus away from the blame game and toward research and new discoveries on the horizon.

Mueller also advises advocacy groups to pursue corporate sponsorship from companies that may have similar aims or interests in reducing cancer rates. Being associated with a health campaign is more than just a corporate PR coup — it’s a meaningful way for a business to give back to the community and establish itself as a company with a solid reputation, according to Buffy Swinehart, cause-related marketing manager for insurance colossus Aflac Inc., which recently raised more than $1.16 million for pediatric cancer research at its Georgia-based Aflac Cancer Center during a recent fundraising campaign held on Facebook.com. In addition, Aflac sales agents routinely donate portions of their commission to the center — contributing as much as $325,000 in a single month.

“You’re trying to make a connection with an individual and touch them emotionally,” Swinehart added. “Any family at any time can be touched by cancer.”