When I was a kid, I was well aware of the dangers of cigarette smoking, and the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.  However, when Dana Reeve was diagnosed and then died from lung cancer in 2006 at just 44 years of age, I became aware that non-smoker lung cancer also cast a dark shadow, that over the past decade has only grown larger.

Every 2 1/2 minutes someone is getting diagnosed with lung cancer.  And people are getting lung cancer diagnoses at increasingly younger ages.  People who are under 45 or 50 are more commonly diagnosed than in the past, and younger people tend to have more advanced lung cancer at the time of diagnosis than older patients.  A great number of younger patients, like my dear college friend Art,  are diagnosed with stage 4 disease.