NEWS

NCI's Childhood Cancer Monograph Released on WEB

Gwen Moulton

While children with cancer are much more likely to survive today than they were 20 years ago, a new monograph published on the World Wide Web by the National Cancer Institute is aimed at aiding the continuing search for answers about these rare cancers.

Cancer Incidence and Survival Among Children and Adolescents: United States SEER Program 1975-1995 is a compendium of statistical trends and risk factors associated with childhood cancers. Since the 1970s, overall death rates for most of these cancers declined and survival rates improved markedly. Incidence rates for children leveled off during the mid-1980s, and have remained stable for most types of childhood cancers. In 1998, an estimated 12,400 children under 20 years old were diagnosed with cancer and 2,500 died from it.

Childhood cancers vary by type of histology, site of disease origin, race, gender, and age. To explain this spectrum of malignancies, the monograph details incidence, mortality, survival, and demographic trends for individual primary sites and histologic groupings. Other chapters are dedicated to infants, adolescents ages 15 to 19 years, and mortality rates. Overall trends combining all cancer sites are included.

Among the findings by single year of age, infants had the highest cancer incidence rates. Incidence rates overall declined as age increased until age 9. This age-incidence pattern, however, varied widely by different types of cancer, each described in a separate chapter. By 5-year age delineations, children under 5 and over 14 tended overall to have higher incidence rates than those in the middle range between 5 and 14 years. Boys overall had a higher incidence of childhood cancer than girls. About 57% of cancers were leukemia, malignant tumors of the central nervous system, or lymphoma. By race, black children had lower incidence rates overall in 1990 to 1995 than white children.

The monograph is available at the SEER home page at: http://www-seer.ims.nci.nih.gov under publications. Print versions of the publication will be available in November.



             
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