2020: Where Is She Now?
Rather than follow the path of her late father, Mario Cuomo (the 52nd governor of New York), and her brother Andrew (the current New York governor), Margaret Cuomo, MD, forged her own road into medicine. Her focus is on prevention, which she promotes through her work as a spokesperson for True Health Initiative, an advocacy group of health experts dedicated to “creating a world free of preventable diseases” like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
This year, the Centre for Responsible Leadership, an international organization that brings together thought leaders to solve global problems, invited Cuomo to participate in its Responsible Leaders Summit at the United Nations. “My contributions to the summit are focused on global health, and the ways in which nations can emphasize disease prevention through lifestyle, and through consumer protection against harmful chemicals,” she says.
Cuomo’s 2013 book, A World Without Cancer, has been turned into a one-hour TV show, which premiered on Amazon.com in January. “This vital information will now be available to a wide audience around the world,” she says.
Original Story
You could say politics is in Margaret Cuomo’s DNA. Her late father, Mario, was the 52nd governor of New York, and her brother Andrew currently holds the position. Yet from an early age, Cuomo’s passion was medicine.
She entered the radiology field in the 1980s, when imaging technologies like the CT scan and MRI had just entered the medical arena. “It was so exciting to me that there were these new tools that could enable physicians to pinpoint the diagnosis in a way that had never been done before,” she says.
That decade also brought a flood of people with cancer, many of whom were diagnosed with late-stage or aggressive forms of the disease. “It seemed like we were not ahead of the game, we were behind,” Cuomo says. “We were losing too many young, productive lives. After a while, I reached a critical tipping point where I said to myself, ‘We must be able to do better.’”
In 2013, she wrote A World Without Cancer, a book focused on the power of cancer prevention. “There are many strategies within our control every day, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep,” Cuomo says.
She points to several, including a plant-based diet, physical activity, good quality sleep, stress management, smoking cessation, and sun protection. “These are messages that we can start offering our young people and carry right through the lifecycle,” she says.
Cuomo also pushes for prevention through two nonprofit organizations: TrueHealth Initiative is a coalition of experts promoting lifestyle as medicine, and HeritX aims to prevent inherited cancers linked to the BRCA gene mutation. She believes that with initiatives like these, a world without cancer is possible.
“When you get brilliant minds together and they’re focused and dedicated, amazing things can happen,” she says.