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Paediatric Cancer – keeping a look-out for long-term secondary effects
Although the majority of paediatric cancers are now curable, young patients should still be monitored over the long term. As a new Dutch study has recently shown, they are in fact at increased risk of suffering “serious health problems” when they become adults.
This is especially true of “those who have received radiotherapy treatment”, notes Professor Huib Caron of Amsterdam. With his team, he studied around 1,400 patients with an average age of 25 who had suffered from cancer during their childhood.
The results show that three out of four still report what Professor Caron considers to be “secondary effects. It therefore seems that such effects can occur at a much later date. The most common are “orthopaedic disorders”, but Professor Caron also cites the emergence of new tumours (affecting a different organ), obesity, infertility and cognitive, psychosocial, neurological and endocrine disorders.
According to his study, patients who have suffered from bone cancer, leukaemia and certain kidney cancers – Wilms’ tumour for example – appear to be at greater risk of secondary effects of this type. All of which are good reasons for close monitoring … and over the long term.
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