Childhood cancer remains a challenge, and in my opinion there are still far too many lives taken too soon from this disease. However, as I previously posted, we have come so far. What I left out was the extraordinary cost it has taken to get us here.
As I discussed previously, we can push the limits of chemotherapy with children. The result is that we have dramatically increased the survival rates for childhood cancer. The bad news is that survival comes at a steep cost. Studies show that 85-98% of adults that are childhood cancer survivors have chronic health conditions that can usually be attributed to the therapy they received as children.
Childhood cancer survivors have an average of 17 chronic health conditions by age 50.
For example, the two most common tumors I take care of are Ewing’s Sarcoma and Osteosarcoma (bone tumors). Standard therapy for these two types of tumors would include 7 different drugs between the two of them. Here is just a laundry list of some of the long-term side effects parents have to sign off on to save their child’s life:
1. Infertility
2. Heart damage (sometimes needing a heart transplant, other times “just” causing chronic heart failure managed with medicine)
3. Secondary malignancies (the therapy to cure you can cause a different type of cancer)
4. Permanent hearing loss
5. Nerve damage
6. Vocal cord paralysis
7. Liver damage
8. Kidney damage
9. Bladder damage
10. Inability to maintain electrolyte balances
11. Neurotoxicity
12. Attention and learning problems
This is just the beginning and doesn’t include all types of therapy, only what we give for two cancers! Can you imagine having no choice but to accept this or your child will die? Our hope is that through continued research, our therapies will become more targeted and have less damaging “off target” effects than what we currently have available and that will in turn reduce the development of chronic health conditions. Due to the genetic landscape of childhood cancer, we aren’t sure that this type of targeted therapy will be feasible for all childhood cancers, but we are asking the questions and doing the studies to find the answers.
Surviving is the first step, but it’s not enough on its own. Our children deserve to thrive.
Any childhood cancer survivor should be followed by a physician knowledgeable in the risk factors associated with their disease treatment. If you or someone you know is a survivor of childhood cancer, make sure the patient is adequately monitored for chronic health conditions. This program can help: Passport for Care
