U.S. Children Survive Leukemia Longer

Childhood cancer patients can go on to live 20 years or more if they make it through the first few years after diagnosis, doctors said on Sunday — good news at a time when 75 percent of children are now surviving.

Scientists found that children who survived for five years after being treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia had a 90 percent chance of going on to live for another 20 years or more. The study is one of the first to look at how cancer affects a patient’s life after the first five years. The President’s Cancer Panel on Friday said medicine has neglected to follow up on cancer patients to see how their lives turn out. This is an especially important issue for children, who undergo harsh chemotherapy or radiation at a time when their bodies are still growing. It is known they risk other cancers later in life, but little is known about long-term survival. Dr. Smita Bhatia of the City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles and colleagues looked at 8,444 cases of all patients age 18 and younger who were treated starting in 1979. They found that 6,404, just over 75 percent, lived five or more years after diagnosis, and 91 percent of the survivors went on to live another 20 years or more. Of those who died, 62 percent had a relapse of the same leukemia, Bhatia told a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Her team also studied how long child cancer patients lived after bone marrow transplants and found that 78 percent survived for 15 years. In the 1960s, childhood cancer killed virtually all its victims. Overall, according to the latest report on cancer from the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, five-year survival rates for childhood cancers have increased 20 percent over the past 20 years for boys and 13 percent for girls. Among adults, survival varies greatly depending on the type of cancer. More than 99 percent of men diagnosed with prostate cancer will live five years, but five-year survival for lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer, is just 15 percent.(Source: American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute: Reuters Health News: June 2004)