Childhood Cancer Survivors Have Health Problems Despite Better Treatment

This new study showed that 25% of childhood cancer survivors develop health problems when they are young adults.

Although there has been a significant improvement in the way cancer is treated along the years, childhood cancer survivors still have health problems. A new study showed that children who have been treated for cancer have health problems when they grow up.

This happens even after treatments have improved. This new study showed that 25% of childhood cancer survivors develop health problems when they are young adults. To conduct this study researchers compared the results of childhood cancer survivors that have been treated in the 90s, 80s, and 70s. They compared these results to the results of their sibling to see if there are any differences.

Despite the fact that they expected that people who were treated in the 90s to have fewer health problems than the ones treated in the 90s, the results didn’t show that. The results of almost 15,000 survivors of childhood cancer have been compared in order make this study.

Researchers were expecting to see a bigger difference between people treated in the 70s and those treated in the 90s, but the difference was little. They discovered that in the 70s 33% of childhood cancer survivors suffer from health problems when they grew up. 21% of those treated in the 90s have health problems. This means that in 20 years there has been a little improvement for cancer survivors.

The ones that were the most affected after they were treated for childhood cancer were the ones that didn’t exercise or smoked. Kids that were treated in the 90s for bone cancer reported persistent pain while those who were treated for leukemia mentioned that they had poor general health.

This study showed that despite the fact that more people were saved by these new drugs and treatments, their life quality hasn’t improved very much over the time. The researchers mentioned that people should focus on having a healthy life even after they survived cancer in order to have a better life.

Doctors advised people to avoid smoking and junk food because these can bring more problems like high cholesterol, obesity, or even second cancer. People should listen to what doctors are saying so that they can have a great, healthy life even if they suffered from cancer.

Image source: Wikipedia