Childhood, young adult cancer survival betters but followup critical
- November 20, 2015, 10:21 pm
- Health News
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HQ City Desk
QUETTA: Cure rates for teens and young adults with cancer have improved, but survivors face higher risks of being hospitalized than people in the general population because of the double-edged sword of cancer treatment, doctors say.
Thursday's issue of JAMA Oncology includes two studies describing how child and young adult survivors of cancer fare in the long term.
In the first study, doctors and researchers from the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen looked at the risk for hospitalization in 33,555 five-year young cancer survivors over six decades compared with people in the general population.
Survivors of leukemia, brain cancer and Hodgkin's lymphoma — cancers characterized by particularly intensive and long treatments — were at highest risk, said Kathrine Rugbjerg, Dr. Jørgen Olsen and their co-authors.
"The findings underscore a great diversity of cancer-related health problems that physicians and patients should be knowledgeable about," they said.
Dr. Paul Nathan, an oncologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, treats and studies survivors of childhood cancer. He was not involved in the newly published research.
"What's happened over time is that we have gotten better at using the tools at our disposal, chemotherapy, radiation, sometimes a bone marrow transplant, to cure patients. Compared to two or three decades ago, survival is very much improved. Eighty per cent of kids with cancer will survive. Thirty or 40 years ago, most of them didn't," Nathan said.
The problem is, in order to achieve that, we have had to treat some patients more intensively and so we are seeing more survivors. Some of them, though, may have long-term consequences of the more intensive therapies."
Potential long-term consequences include:
â– Heart failure.
â– Increased risk of heart attack.
â– Heart valve problems.
â– Difficulty completing school or holding down a job.
