(pharmaceutical-technology.com) – While survival rates for childhood cancer have increased, many survivors are blighted by health problems later in life. According to a new study, these ‘late effects’ seem to be no better for more recently treated patients than for those who were treated in the 1970s. So what needs to be done to improve the situation? Abi Millar spoke to the study’s authors to find out.
When thinking about childhood cancer, the emphasis is usually on survival – treating the patient, guarding against remission and eradicating the cancer for good. Of course, this is as it should be. In the US, 15,700 children are diagnosed with cancer each year, and it is mostly thanks to recent advances in treatment that 88% of them now survive five years or more.
However, one major question is often overlooked: what happens next? According to the children’s cancer charity CureSearch, three out of five survivors develop ‘late effects’ (i.e. problems related to cancer treatment that persist once the treatment is over). These can include hormonal or gastrointestinal problems, chronic pain, or even secondary cancers.
When you consider the sheer number of adult survivors (more than 420,000 in the US), it is clear that the longer-term prognosis ought not to be overlooked.
This was the thinking behind the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS), which published its findings in November in the Annals of Internal Medicine. A retrospective cohort study, it looked at survivors of childhood cancer, more than five years removed from treatment, who were treated between 1970 and 1999.
“The study was designed to evaluate late outcomes among survivors of childhood cancer, with the goal of providing the foundation for interventions to prevent or remediate adverse health outcomes and also to guide current therapies to minimise late effects,” explains Dr Kirsten Ness, one of the lead investigators and a member of the St. Jude Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control, which co-ordinated the study.