While long-term survivors of childhood cancer do live longer due to major improvements in the treatment programs, new study reveals that their overall health status does not suffer significant improvements in time. The study was carried out on three decades of therapy survivors, suggesting that patients do not report an improvement in their health status.
The Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) is a multi-institutional research among young subjects who recovered from the disease. The latest study conducted on more than 14,000 adults who underwent treatment from 1970 to 1999, and it was published in the online journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
The CCSS is focused on finding the most relevant information on how patients recover from the disease while analyzing the contributing factors that may have an impact on the negative health status among the survivors. The new research was conducted in the hope of bringing a new perspective on the matter, as the groups of patients treated between 1987 and 1999 were also included in this study.
Medical Advancements Don't Guarantee Full Health Recovery
Due to the large database, the investigators were presented the opportunity to conduct a better holistic analysis of the treatments and the ways they affected the patients' health over the last three decades. According to Kirsten Ness, co-first author of the paper, the very idea of having survived cancer transforms the stories of those patient into success stories due to the advancements of modern medicine. However, as it seems, not everything functions flawlessly once the cancer is beaten.
"Surprisingly, the data from the survey show a lack of improvement in perceived health status by childhood cancer survivors over the past 30 years, which serves as an important reminder that cures for cancer do not come without some consequences to patients," she noted.
The last study was conducted on 14,566 adult patients whose ages varied between 18 and 48. They had all been formerly treated for pediatric cancer, and the number of institutions where they had received medical care reached 27 different facilities in North America. The core purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the treatments for solid tumors and blood cancers had a negative impact on the patients' health years after being conducted.
However, with the lack of health improvement within the groups of survivors, the conclusion of the analysis cannot be generalized due to limitations of the study. A methodological problem is that not all the survivors who were eligible to participate to the study agreed to, which may have contributed to the results of the study.
