Kids’ treatment for cancer progresses

CHICAGO — The move to make cancer treatments gentler for children has paid a double dividend: More children are surviving than ever before, and they don’t face the long-term complications that doomed many of their peers a generation ago, new research shows.

Radiation and chemotherapy have saved countless children from leukemia and other types of cancer, but some of the treatments can damage the heart or other organs, problems that prove fatal years later.

In the 1990s, a push began to try to prevent those “late effects” by giving smaller, more targeted doses of radiation, avoiding certain drugs and changing the way chemo is given.

The new study, which tracked more than 34,000 childhood cancer survivors over several decades, found that those treatments didn’t hurt the children’s chances of survival.

Survival continued to improve, even with scaled-back treatments.

And fewer children died from other cancers or heart or lung problems 15 years after their initial treatment ended.

“The field needs good news,” and the study gives it, said Dr. Greg Armstrong of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Treating childhood cancer is “one of the miracles of modern medicine,” Armstrong said. “Fifty years ago less than 30 percent of kids would survive childhood cancer, but now we know that over 80 percent will.”

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