(USA Today) – Progress against childhood cancer has been bittersweet.
Up to 80% of U.S. children now survive cancer — more than at any time in history. But the chemotherapy and radiation that kill cancer cells can cause serious or even life-threatening side effects — from second cancers to heart and lung problems — as children grow up.
Now, a new study finds that doctors’ efforts to both cure children’s tumors and protect them from long-term complications have paid off. A study presented today in Chicago finds that the death rate 15 years after a pediatric cancer diagnosis has been cut in half since the 1970s.
About 6% of children treated for cancer from 1990 to 1994 died within 15 years of diagnosis, down from 12.4% of those treated from 1970 to 1974, according to a study of more than 34,000 patients presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Everyone included in the study was considered to have survived their original cancer, because they lived at least five years after diagnosis. But the legacy of cancer continued to weigh heavily on patients, with about 41% of the nearly 4,000 deaths during the study related to the “late effects” of children’s treatment, said Gregory Armstrong, principal researcher of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study.