Thehe childhood cancers are rare (0.7% to 0.9% of total cancers) but constitute a scandal, an enigma and a frustration, all at the same time. They also fuel total determination and hope.
2,500 to 3,000 children and adolescents, about 1 in 440, are stricken with cancer each year. Five hundred do not recover from it, making these diseases the leading causes of death at this age, after domestic accidents. This figure may appear modest compared to the 400,000 cancers now detected each year and the 160,000 deaths attributed to them. However, they appear to be an incredible scandal.
We all feel that a child should not develop cancer, much less die from it. These episodes leave the parents stunned, marked for life. The injury caused to sisters and brothers never fully heals, it often becomes a structuring element in the building of their personality. Children’s cancers, their deaths, are cataclysms.
They are puzzles, too, unfair anomalies for these little ones who have never smoked, drunk or been involved in risky behavior. Their short life should not have allowed the accumulation of these gene mutations which explain the ordinary cancers occurring especially in the last third of an existence. And yet cancer has developed, it can take them away.
In fact, the disease differs at this age from that which occurs in adults, the locations are not the same, neither are the cell types concerned. In children, leukemia and tumors of the central nervous system, including the eye, dominate. Lymphomas, sarcomas and always tumors of the central nervous system and leukemias prevail in frequency in adolescents.
Very real satisfaction factors
Schematically, cancer tissues very often have a marked embryonic appearance (retinoblastoma, neuroblastoma, nephroblastoma or Wilms tumor, hepatoblastoma, etc.). Everything happens as if a mutation, often due to a chromosomal rearrangement, had blocked the differentiation of the embryonic tissue whose growth continues in a tumor fashion. A great diversity of chromosomal rearrangements is also noted in leukemias.
The embryonic tumor tissue is, apart from its absence of differentiation, of normal appearance, it is hardly considered strange by the immune system which does not react, which leaves little hope for the effectiveness of the first type of immunotherapy. modern.
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