The world was stunned to learn that Dana Reeve, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Peter Jennings, who had quit smoking many years before his lung cancer death -- and who had only recently taken up the smoking habit again before being diagnosed with lung cancer -- was perhaps less confusing. Jennings publicly blamed smoking for his cancer. For many among us, spoken or unspoken, lung cancer has been thought to be a smoker's disease. With the loss of Dana Reeve, a non-smoker, new questions were asked, and conversation began, into all the causes of lung cancer. As a result of Dana Reeve's lung cancer death, non-smokers were asking out loud -- how much danger am I in for developing lung cancer. The every day person was soon to learn that not much is truly known about lung cancer, or clearly spelled out.

One of the most confounding truths about lung cancer and smoking, is that only 15 percent of smokers develop lung cancer, and almost 20 percent of lung cancer diagnosis involve non-smokers. University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researchers are attempting to develop an assessment model to determine who is at greater risk for lung cancer. Here is some of the information they have come up with so far in the assessment model:

• Heavy smokers who have a previous history of emphysema exhibit nearly a four times increased risk of lung cancer than light smokers without emphysema.
• The risk of developing lung cancer increases to nearly 11-fold if a patient with the same medical history also has an inefficient DNA repair capacity.
• Individuals with a history of allergies have a 29 percent reduced risk of lung cancer.
• Such individuals, who also exhibit efficient DNA repair capacity, have a 56 percent reduced risk of developing lung cancer, compared with people who do not have allergies with poor DNA repair genes.
• Genetically, family members of lung cancer patients had more than a six-fold increased risk of developing lung cancer before the age of 50. Their risk of developing any type of cancer before age 50 was 44 percent higher.

Because there is such an increased focus on lung cancer now, this is just the beginning of information we can expect to learn in the near future to not only predict, but prevent by intervention, lung cancer for those who are at greater risk of developing the disease.