out about the Millers’ radon as she chatted with friends on that neighborhood walk.
She called her daughter and Melissa called Maddie, who filled her in.
“ When she said her great‐grandmother passed away from non‐smoker’ s lung cancer... and her house was high in radon, I thought,‘ Bingo, that’ s what happened to me,’” Melissa said.“ I finally had an answer.”
Pill developed that can help inhibit some non‐smoking lung cancers
Dr. Sameer Mahesh, director of Summa Health Cancer Institute, is leading Melissa’ s cancer care.
Melissa, he said, has a unique type of lung cancer: ALK‐positive lung cancer.
Only about 5 % of non‐small cell lung cancers are ALK or ALK‐positive, said Mahesh, who has worked at Summa since 2008.
“ There is no real cause that has been ascertained as to what may drive ALKpositive lung cancers,” he said.“ But she being a non‐smoker, the odds of her having some kind of mutation was very high.”
Mutations are usually caused by something in people’ s lives that causes cells to break down, not properly repair themselves and then transform into cancer, he said.
“ So we don’ t know 100 % that radon is behind this,” Mahesh said of Melissa’ s cancer.
There is no test that can pinpoint the cause. Researchers only discovered the ALK mutation as a cause about 20 years ago, though it likely existed long before that, he said.
So far, research has shown no correlation between radon exposure and ALK mutations, Mahesh said. Yet radon“ is the most common cause for lung cancer in non‐smokers,” he said.
If radon was the cause of the ALK mutation in Melissa’ s case, he said, the gas slowly changed cells in her lungs as she breathed the radon in her home.
Melissa’ s primary symptom was excruciating headaches, Mahesh said, so that needed to be tackled first, particularly because there were so many tiny brain tumors.
Her treatment began with two weeks of radiation therapy to her brain. The next step in treatment wasn’ t surgery or chemotherapy. It was a pill.
Though ALK mutations are a fairly recent scientific discovery, there already are several pills that target it, including a newer second‐generation class of medication better able to block the mutation.