The White Ribbon Project

This is hope, progress, and survivorship moving forward. 🫁🤍✨

We are so grateful to Dr. Kristin Higgins, Chief Clinical Officer and Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at City of Hope Atlanta, for bringing lung cancer survivorship issues to the forefront.

As more people with lung cancer are living longer and exceeding life expectancy, we must also recognize the new and evolving needs that come with survivorship.

Long-term survival brings new questions, new challenges, and the need for multidisciplinary care that supports the whole person, not only the cancer.

This is an exciting and hopeful time for people living with lung cancer. Progress in treatment means more people are living longer, and now survivorship care must grow with them.

We are grateful to see these important conversations happening and to see lung cancer survivorship being recognized, studied, and prioritized so patients and people with lung cancer can keep going! 🤍✨🫁

Anyone with lungs can get lung cancer, and no one ever deserves it.

Fifteen years ago, long-term survival in lung cancer was not something oncologists planned around. That is starting to change. Dr. Kristin Higgins, chief clinical officer at @cityofhopeatlanta and radiation oncologist, has watched targeted therapy reshape outcomes for patients with specific genetic mutations in non-small cell lung cancer. The latest long-term data from the CROWN study showed that patients with ALK-mutated disease treated with lorlatinib had not yet reached median progression-free survival. For Dr. Higgins, those results signal something the field has not been able to say before. Lung cancer now has long-term survivors. And for the first time, oncologists can start building survivorship care to match. This special edition of On the Edge of Breakthrough: Voices of Cancer Research is out now. Tune in to hear Dr. Higgins, along with Dr. Alan Bryce and Dr. Joseph Mikhael, on the research shaping conversations at @ascocancer 2026. Link in bio. #ASCO26

Delay in diagnosis is costing precious time.

Thank you to People for bringing lung cancer awareness to the public and sharing Kim Oakhill's story. Bringing attention to what too many people with lung cancer experience: symptoms dismissed, assumptions made, and answers delayed is critical.

Kim was fit and healthy. She had extreme fatigue, night sweats, poor sleep, and leg pain. Her symptoms were attributed to perimenopause before she was ultimately diagnosed with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer. Her story is painful, important, and far too familiar.

We are encouraged to listen to our bodies. But too often, when people report symptoms and do not “fit the profile” for lung cancer, they are dismissed.

That is costing lives.

Lung cancer should be considered, even in people without a smoking history. Even in younger people. Even when symptoms seem vague.

Anyone with lungs can get lung cancer.

We need listening, urgency, and earlier detection.

We need stigma and outdated assumptions to stop delaying care.

No one should have to fight this hard to be heard. Thank you Kim for sharing your important story. Your advocacy is life-saving.

We have to keep going and growing awareness, including among our health care providers who have the power to continue learning, to listen, recognize symptoms, and act sooner.

Mom of 3's Extreme Fatigue and Night Sweats Were Dismissed as Perimenopause. Then She Learned She Had Stage 4 Cancer Kim Oakhill, 51, a mother of three, experienced symptoms including extreme fatigue and night sweats, before she went to the doctor. She told PEOPLE her symptoms were dismissed as perimenopause, before she was eventually diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Day ️️️️2️⃣

Lung cancer affects every community, but not everyone experiences the same care and outcomes.

Too many people continue to face barriers to screening, diagnosis, treatment, and support. Raising awareness is one step toward creating a future where everyone has access to the care they deserve.

Let’s challenge misconceptions and help change the conversation around lung cancer.