11-05-2025
Cystic Fibrosis walk raises $33K in Morgantown
MORGANTOWN, (WBOY) — A little more than $33,000 was raised on Saturday morning in Morgantown to help fund cystic fibrosis research, which will help extend the lives of CF patients.
'Great Strides' walks around the country are organized each year by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF), which has worked since 1955 to raise awareness for CF as well as raise money for the research needed to develop new treatments for the disease.
David Dent, an assistant swim coach for West Virginia University, was recently diagnosed with the disease in April, but said he's already starting to feel an improvement from his symptoms since he began treatment a few weeks ago.
'I was diagnosed on April 11th of this year, and it's been a whirlwind to get to this point, actually,' Dent said. 'It's a lot of years of just being told that I just had a cold or my anxiety was driving my sickness and things like that.'
The CFF estimates that more than 40,000 people in the United States are living with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that affects the mucous membranes in the body. This can have severe impacts on a patient's lungs, intestines, liver, reproductive organs and more. In 1999, the life expectancy of a CF patient was around 30 years, but continued research has raised the median life expectancy for recently diagnosed CF patients to 60 years or more.
One thing that makes cystic fibrosis a challenging disease to treat is the number of genetic variations for the disease; there are more than 2,000 known mutations according to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, meaning some treatment options will be effective for some mutations but not others.
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'Once I got diagnosed, I saw that there was a walk coming up pretty quickly right after my diagnosis, and decided that I wanted to help out,' Dent said. 'I do have the mutations that qualified me for some of the best treatment in the cystic fibrosis community, and so luckily I was able to jump in right away and start treating it, but there's a lot that still aren't able to.'
However, those patients who are able to benefit from the latest developments in CF medicine are seeing large improvements in their overall health. Associate Director of the Mountain State Cystic Fibrosis Center Dr. Kathryn Moffett said the latest drugs have been a 'game changer' for many people with CF, and those treatments are a direct result of fundraisers like the one held in Morgantown on Saturday.
'It has totally changed this disease,' Moffett said. 'Patients are healthy, we don't have patients in the hospital anymore. They get chronic infections, but [they don't need] to come in anymore for a course of, say, two weeks of IV antibiotics. It's amazing.'
As of Saturday evening, the fundraiser for the Great Strides walk is still ongoing. Anyone who wishes to donate can find the Morgantown walk's fundraiser page here.
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