Dr. Jeffrey Velotta is joined by KPSOM student Elaine Liang who participated in the school’s SCORE rotation.

By Nina Huang

When Dr. Jeffrey Velotta, Clinical Professor of Clinical Science at Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine (KPSOM), returned to the Bay Area in 2014 after years of thoracic surgery training in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, he thought he understood the landscape of lung cancer.

“I expected to treat the typical patients you learn about in training—older male smokers,” he said. Instead, his first years in Oakland delivered a shock.

“All of a sudden, my patients were Asian. And many of them were women. And they weren’t smokers. I wasn’t seeing this anywhere else.”

Velotta, now a leading thoracic surgeon, says that moment changed the trajectory of his career.

“It hit me sometime in 2014 and 2015: we’re missing something huge. These women were younger, Asian, female, healthy—and still getting lung cancer. I realized we had to do something because no one was talking about it.”

Since then, Velotta has emerged as one of the nation’s strongest voices calling attention to a largely unrecognized crisis. His recent publications—three major papers released in the last two months—use real-world data to document the disproportionate rise of lung cancer among Asian American women, especially non-smokers.

“People think lung cancer is a smoker’s disease,” he said. “But that’s just not true. It’s actually more prevalent in women than men, regardless of smoking status. And here in Northern California, Asian non-smoking women are the fastest-growing group.”

Velotta explained that lung cancer often develops from a combination of influences—genetics, air quality, secondhand smoke, and even everyday household exposures such as fumes from high-heat cooking oils commonly used in Asian kitchens.

For decades, researchers have described what’s known internationally as the “Asian never-smoker phenomenon,” but Velotta said it never gained traction in American medicine.

To read the entire article: https://nwasianweekly.com/2025/11/lung-cancer-awareness-month-surgeon-exposes-a-hidden-crisis-among-asian-american-women/