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By Betsy Lievense, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Kids who beat one of the most curable forms of pediatric cancer may not be out of the woods yet. A recent study reveals survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia are at increased risk of developing secondary cancers up to 30 years after treatment, which means doctors may need to monitor patients a lot longer than they previously thought.
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Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is by far the most common type of childhood cancer, with 4,000 new cases reported each year. Although 80 percent of patients survive this highly curable form of cancer at least 10 years after treatment, researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., found the risk of secondary cancer increases with age.
In order to assess the prevalence of secondary cancers in acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients, researchers used data from 2,169 children and adolescents treated at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital between 1962 and 1998. Of the 1,290 patients who remained cancer-free, 123 developed a secondary form of cancer. Roughly 4 percent of these patients developed a new form of cancer after 15 years, and 10.85 percent were plagued with a new form of cancer 30 years after they initially went into remission. Thirty years after remission, the majority of patients who developed secondary forms of cancer were afflicted with carcinomas or brain tumors. Myeloid malignancies, sarcomas and lymphomas were more rare.
"Low-grade tumors or slow-growing tumors like meningioma and basal cell carcinoma are curable," Nobuko Hijiya, M.D., assistant professor at the University of Tennessee and assistant member in the oncology department at St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, told Ivanhoe, "They do cause some health complications, so it's easier to treat them if they are caught earlier."
Study authors advise doctors to keep a close watch on patients who have beaten ALL, as the risk of new cancers does not plateau at 15 to 20 years but actually increases.
"Obviously, the main point of this paper is long-term follow-up," said Dr. Hijiya. "In previous papers that were published by other groups, the observation time was no more than 15 or 17 years or so, and nobody really knew [whether patients were still at risk after 20 years]. That's what we showed."
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
SOURCE: Ivanhoe interview with Nobuko Hijiya, M.D.; The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2007;297:1207-1215
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