Conny Salenbien (62) has already received lung cancer three times, without ever smoking. “In 2020 I got stage 4 with metastases. No more chemo or radiation possible. I now take eight pills a day to slow down tumor growth,” she says.
Lung cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers, with around 9,500 diagnoses in Belgium every year. According to AZ Delta pneumologist Ulrike Himpe, smoking is still the biggest cause, “but people without smoking history can also get lung cancer, often because of genetic mutations.”