The American Lung Association has released their new year resolutions on aiming to keep your lungs healthier in 2025.
The New Year’s Resolution: Prioritize Lung Health in 2025, gives you five essential tips to follow to help your lungs grow healthy and maintain their health.
The number one thing on the list making sure you’re getting regular checkups, followed by quit smoking, take the savedbythescan quiz, stay up to date on immunizations, and limit exposure to air pollutants.
Dr. Robert Herron, thoracic surgeon, director of the lung cancer screening program WVU Medicine at Wheeling Hospital and volunteer spokesperson for the ALA, says that the resolutions seek to make sure that people are maintaining their lung health.
“I think that resolution just sees to keep the lungs healthy, keep the lungs fit,” Herron said.
One of the things that Herron emphasized was the available lung screening programs.
He says that anyone who is between the ages of 50-80 and have smoked for 30 years or have stopped smoking in the last 15 years should be put into one of those programs by their primary care doctor.
“If you meet those criteria, you automatically qualify for a low dose CT scan for lung cancer screening,” Herron said. “It’s been shown to benefit that fit that bill so to speak.”
He says that if your able to catch the cancer early it improves your chances of curing and surviving with the help of either surgery, immunotherapy or radiation.
While a lot of the symptoms that people experience are non-specific for lung cancer, Herron says there a few symptoms that people should look out for, especially if you’re at risk.
“If you have this dry nagging cough that won’t go away and it came on sporadically, unintentional weight lost, if you ever cough up any bit of blood that usually warrants an in-depth further workup,” he said.
He says that in his experience, the lung cancer screening programs help.
“We’ve had a low-dose CT in Wheeling now since 2021,” Herron said. “There’s been countless cases where these lung nodule’s have been found in very early stages where lung cancer is curable.”
To find out more about lung cancer visit the American Lung Association website here.