Long-term study on childhood cancer released

It wasn’t so long ago that a diagnosis of cancer in children was an almost certain death sentence.

Nowadays more than 80 percent of affected children survive into later life and beyond. However, with this greater life expectancy comes an increased risk of a recurrance of the initial cancer, secondary cancers and a host of other debilitating health conditions.

That’s among the key findings of a 30-year study by the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research and the Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, published this week in the Medical Journal of Australia.

It examined 896 survivors treated between 1970 and 1999 and found that relative to the rest of the population of NSW they had an almost five percent higher rate of secondary cancer with 7.46 times the risk of early death, while female survivors were twice as likely to have their lives cut short. Recurrence of the primary childhood cancer was the top cause of earlier death (55 percent), with 12 percent attributed to secondary cancers and 17 percent the result of treatment-related complications.

Dr Lesley Ashton, lead author of the study and Head of the Molecular Epidemiology Group at the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research, said that the data from the study will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of genetic markers that modify the impact of cancer therapies, as well as help to gauge the risk of childhood cancer survivors developing long-term health conditions

“If we can map the genetic factors, we can develop more individualised cancer treatments that do not result in long term health complications,” she said. “Characterising survivors at risk of the late effects of cancer therapy is the first step in this process.”

The CCIA is Australia’s leading research centre for childhood disease in Australia and is the only independent organisation dedicated to finding a cure for childhood cancer. Recently it was relocated to a new purpose-built facility at the Lowy Cancer Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Ashton and her team are seeking to conduct another, larger scale study of the long term health outcomes of cancer therapy in survivors of childhood cancers, and are currently looking for participants in NSW and the ACT.