Brain cancer now deadliest form of childhood cancer in the US, says CDC
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said that brain cancer has now surpassed leukemia as the deadliest form of childhood cancer in the country.
In 1999, nearly one in three children who died had leukemia, while brain cancer only caused one death in four. But by 2014, researchers who were comparing death rates from pediatric cancers in recent years have found that the figures have been reversed.
Treatment advances have allowed doctors to cure many blood-related cancers. Sally Curtin, an author of the report, said in an interview that forms of leukemia that were universally fatal a generation ago are now almost universally curable.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics study, a 20% drop in the overall cancer death rates in children has been seen since 1999, a continuing trend that started in the mid-1970s.
In 2014, cancer killed 2.28 youths ages one to 19 out of 100,000.
Other common sites of fatal childhood cancers included the bone and articular cartilage, thyroid and other endocrine glands and mesothelial and soft tissue. Combined with brain cancer and leukemia, these accounted for 81.6 percent of all childhood cancer deaths in 2014, the report said.
She also noted that brain cancer deaths held stable as leukemia deaths dropped. In 2014, 445 children died from pediatric leukemia, down from 645 in 1999, the CDC reported.
Deaths from childhood brain cancer, however, increased slightly from 516 in 1999 to 534 in 2014, the study found.
According to Katherine Warren, head of pediatric neuro-oncology at the National Cancer Institute, there has been no significant headway made in the area of pediatric brain tumors. She said childhood brain cancer is more difficult to treat, in part because the blood-brain barrier protects the central nervous system from toxins. This makes it more difficult to deliver chemotherapy.
Category: Features, Health alert
