Cancer research showcased at Fox run
Taking part in the Terry Fox Run is important to cancer survivor Geoff Holmes and his wife Mandi.
“It’s the least you can do to send back a little bit of support to the medical community that saved your life,” said Holmes. “If he (Terry Fox) can do it with one leg, we can do it at 53. Even if we have to crawl or bike it, we’ll come back.”
Holmes joined hundreds of people for St. Catharines’ run on Sunday.
The St. Catharines Terry Fox Run was moved to Brock University from Port Dalhousie, where it had been for the past 33 years, due to the flooding in Lakeside Park. The move definitely did not hurt the run. Online donations and registration bolstered the event, said run organizer John Grummett.
A safe run area through the roads on campus coupled with the fact that Brock is a recipient of about $600,000 from the Terry Fox Foundation for research into cancer screening, made sense to relocate to the university.
Run participants were invited to take a tour of the labs where some of the money has gone into cancer research.
“I know sometimes you donate your money and you don’t know where it is going to, but here, thanks to your donations, we are actually doing work in order to improve lung cancer screening and detect it much earlier,” said Asia Przepiorkowski, a first-year masters student researching epidemiology.
One of the labs included in the tour focused on screening for lung cancer, which is extremely important because once symptoms of the disease show it is too late for surgery, making lung cancer the most deadly cancer.
“Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in North America and many other countries in the world and this is due to the fact that symptoms don’t appear until late in patients and therefore it is diagnosed at a late stage making survival very low,” said Meera Mahmud, a second-year masters student in epidemiolgy.
“So, thanks to all the funding we get from the Terry Fox research institute, my supervisor (Dr. Martin Tammemagi) actually made a model that detects who will get lung cancer in six years, and this is very important because it is used to screen people. The idea is that if you screen high-risk people for lung cancer you actually prevent more lung cancer deaths. So his model has been shown to be much more efficient in detecting lung cancer in patients.”
Cancer Care Ontario has begun a lung cancer screening pilot project called Lung Cancer Screening for People at High Risk, that will be using Tammemagi’s model.
The model which focuses on mitigating factors such as age, weight, smoking (non-smoking) history, family cancer history, etc., is available to the public, free of charge, online at www.borcku.ca/lungcancer-risk-calculator.
At the end of the questionnaire, your chance of getting lung cancer in the next six years is spat out as a percentage. If that percentage is greater than two per cent, you are recommended for lung cancer screening.
Holmes endured another form of cancer.
“I got diagnosed with testicular cancer about four and a half years ago and I had an operation to remove the growth and then I had to do 13 weeks of chemo,” he said. “It was a really long chemo treatment because it had gotten into my lymph nodes and my back, it was pretty advanced cancer.”
Holmes is one of the lucky ones. After the intensive chemo and surgery, he has been cancer-free.
“The doctor told me that if you make it to five years they basically consider you cured, and I only have six months to go and they are going put cured in quotation marks and I won’t get checked any more than the average person,” he said.
Terry Fox through his crosscountry Marathon of Hope wanted to raise $1 for every Canadian, which would have been about $24 million in 1981. To date, Canadians have raised more than $750 million.
This year about 475 people took part in the St. Catharines walk, raising a total of about $47,000.
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