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ource: Cancer Research UK
More than eight in 10 children with cancer now survive, compared to just three in 10 in the late 1960s.
The number of children surviving cancer for five years or more has risen from 79 per cent to 82 per cent in the last decade.
The increase in survival is largely due to tackling the disease by combining a number of different chemotherapy drugs. Cancer Research UK has played a key role in the clinical trials that proved the benefits of these combined treatments.
The latest figures show that survival has improved for all children’s cancers, but liver and bone tumours appear to have made particularly good progress in recent years. Within the last decade five-year survival for liver tumours has jumped from 67 per cent to 82 per cent and for bone tumours from 61 per cent to 68 per cent.
Although more and more children are surviving their cancer due to research, there is still some way to go with certain forms of the disease such as neuroblastoma (67 per cent five year survival) and medulloblastoma (64 per cent five year survival). Further research is essential to discover better and kinder treatments for all cancers.
For many children, surviving does not mean that they are completely free of illness. Even 30 years after their diagnosis, 40 per cent of survivors were affected by severe or life-threatening conditions, or had died due to a chronic health condition. There is still an urgent need to discover better treatments with fewer side effects…READ THE FULL ARTICLE & WATCH THE VIDEO
