US Childhood Cancer Survival Climbs to 90% as Racial Gaps Persist
Five-year survival for children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer in the United States climbed from 60 percent in 1975 to 90 percent in 2017, according to a registry analysis published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
- Five-year overall survival for young cancer patients reached 90 percent by 2017, up from 60 percent in 1975.
- Non-Hispanic Black patients recorded the lowest five-year survival rates across multiple cancer types.
- Advances in diagnostics, risk stratification, clinical trials, targeted drugs, and immunotherapy drove the progress, according to pediatric oncologist Lindsay Schwartz.
Gains across six decades
The registry analysis tracked patients diagnosed with cancer at ages zero to 19 years from 1975 to 2022. Investigators drew on the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results databases, specifically the SEER 8 cohort of 52,165 patients and the SEER 17 cohort of 100,110 patients.
Those survival gains have been uneven across cancer types and racial and ethnic groups. Non-Hispanic Black patients had the lowest five-year overall survival across multiple cancers, a gap that held after adjustment for age and decade of diagnosis, according to the study.
In data covering 2000 to 2017, five-year survival across all cancer types combined was 88 percent among non-Hispanic white patients, 84.5 percent among Hispanic patients, and 85.6 percent among patients from other racial and ethnic groups. For non-Hispanic Black patients, the rate stood at 80.8 percent, UA.News reported.
Worse outcomes for Black children and adolescents were recorded for most cancer types. Five-year survival for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer, rose from 43 percent in 1975 to 95 percent in 2017, while it was about 72 percent for acute myeloid leukemia and about 74 percent for sarcomas, according to UA.News.
Drivers of clinical progress
More accurate diagnostics, risk stratification, clinical trials, molecularly targeted drugs, and immunotherapy contributed to the progress, said Lindsay Schwartz, a pediatric oncologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, in an interview with UA.News.
At the same time, she said that some patients still need more effective and less toxic treatments. “Understanding drivers of disparities is essential to achieve equitable outcomes for all young cancer patients,” the investigators wrote.
Researchers also emphasized the need for lifelong medical monitoring of people who survived cancer in childhood. Among patients treated for Hodgkin lymphoma in the 1970s and early 1980s, survival declined from 87 percent five years after diagnosis to 63 percent after 30 years, according to UA.News.
The investigators evaluated temporal trends with the NCI Joinpoint Regression Program.
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