Michael Wieser (left) and Aaron Goodarzi present a toenail clipping assortment bag that members will use to ship of their toenails for evaluation. Credit score: Colleen De Neve
At 47 years of age, Emi Bossio was feeling good about the place she was. She had a profitable legislation apply, two rising youngsters and good well being. Then she developed a nagging cough. The analysis to come back would take her breath away.
“I never smoked, never. I ate nutritiously and stayed fit. I thought to myself, I can’t have lung cancer,” says Bossio. “It was super shocking. A cataclysmic moment. There are no words to describe it.”
Bossio had to surrender her legislation apply to deal with remedy and therapeutic. As a part of that journey, she’s taken on a brand new function as an advocate to extend consciousness about lung most cancers. She nonetheless has no thought what induced her lung most cancers. Attempting to reply that query is how Bossio got interested within the analysis Dr. Aaron Goodarzi, Ph.D., is doing on the College of Calgary.
Goodarzi leads an interdisciplinary workforce taking a look at environmental causes of lung most cancers, like radon. The naturally occurring, odorless, colorless however radioactive gasoline is the second main reason for lung most cancers after tobacco smoking. Regardless of that, guidelines governing lung most cancers screening packages cannot but embody radon publicity as one of many danger standards. The reason being that few individuals can reliably report their radon publicity throughout a long time like they’ll report the variety of years they’ve smoked tobacco.
Goodarzi could have an answer. He is at present recruiting for a research that might present essential knowledge to estimate an individual’s lung-cancer danger on the added foundation of long-term radon publicity. To do that, he wants Canadians’ toenail clippings.
“We’ve learned that our toenails hold long-term information about our exposure to radioactive toxicants in our environment, such as radon gas. They are one of our body’s archives of past exposure,” says Goodarzi, professor on the Cumming College of Drugs and a principal investigator on the research.
“After you inhale radon, it quite quickly transforms into a specific type of radioactive lead. Your body treats radioactive lead from radon like it does all lead and stores it in slow-shedding tissues such as the skin, hair and nails.”
In a proof-of-concept (pilot) research printed in Atmosphere Worldwide, Goodarzi and co-principal investigator Dr. Michael Wieser, Ph.D., confirmed that measuring radioactive lead in toenails is a promising strategy to estimate an individual’s long-term radon publicity.
“We believe we’ve discovered a reliable, quantitative way to measure long-term radon exposure at an individual level,” says Wieser, a physics professor within the College of Science. “We used a combination of personalized radiation dose epidemiology and isotope dilution mass spectrometry to evaluate ultrasensitive measurements of the radon decay product. We tested for lead isotopes in toenail cuttings and proved they can serve as a quantitative method to reveal lifetime radon exposure at an individual level.”
Members within the pilot undertaking have been recruited from the numerous hundreds of individuals enrolled within the Evict Radon Nationwide Research. There’s a a lot bigger validation trial underway now. Researchers are hoping to recruit as much as 10,000 individuals from throughout Canada. Members might want to take a look at their houses for radon and acquire and ship of their toenail clippings for evaluation by the analysis workforce.
“If this validation trial works, it could transform the future landscape of cancer prevention in Canada. The data will form the evidence that could lead to the inclusion of more patients, whose lung cancer is not caused by tobacco smoke, in potentially life-saving early screening and diagnosis,” says Goodarzi.
Within the pilot research, the researchers famous {that a} main unmet well being care want is that two in 5 individuals who develop lung most cancers in Canada at this time don’t meet present screening inclusion standards, with half of these by no means having smoked tobacco in any respect, and one other half smoking too little or too way back for tobacco alone to be thought of causative.
Tim Monds is a kind of individuals. A non-smoker who in 2016, on the age of 57, was recognized with stage one non-small cell lung most cancers (NSCLC). Inside two years the most cancers progressed to stage 4.
“Lung cancer patients, like me, are living longer. That’s great, but we need to identify cancer risk sooner. We know early detection and screening programs are effective in lowering mortality rates,” says Monds.
“People need to understand that anyone with lungs can get lung cancer,” says Bossio. “I applaud the research the Goodarzi lab is undertaking.”
Extra data:
Quantitative evaluation of the radon (222Rn) decay product 210Pb in human toenails as a delicate measure of customized long-term radon gasoline publicity historical past, Atmosphere Worldwide (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2025.109781
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