DID YOU KNOW?

Children's Cancer Facts

Today, despite amazing research progress, cancer still kills more children than any other disease. Each year cancer kills more children than asthma, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, congenital anomalies, and AIDS, combined.

Did you know:

• 11,000 young people are diagnosed with cancer every year.

• Each year about 2,300 children and teenagers die from cancer.

• Although cure rates are steadily increasing, 35% of children will die from a    diagnosis of cancer.

• One young person a day discoves that  they have Ewing's Sarcoma; every year there are approximately 400 new diagnoses of young patients with Ewing's Sarcoma in the US.

• 36 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer everyday in the United States.

• One in every four elementary schools has a child with cancer.

• The average high school has two students who are current or former cancer patients.

• Childhood cancers affect more potential patient-years of life than any other cancer except breast and lung cancer.

• Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease in children under the age of 15 in the United States.

• The causes of most childhood cancers are unknown. At present, childhood cancer cannot be prevented.

• Childhood cancer occurs regularly, randomly and spares no ethnic group, socioeconomic class, or geographic region. In the United States, the incidence of cancer among adolescents and young adults is increasing at a greater rate than any other age group, except those over 65 years.

• Nationally, the incidence of cancer in children is over 15 times greater than that of AIDS in children.

• One in every 330 Americans develops cancer before the age of 20.

• Many of the principles of therapy used in treating adults with cancer were first tested and developed in children.

• The cancer death rate has dropped more dramatically for children that for any other age group due solely to research.

• Despite these facts, childhood cancer research is vastly and consistently under funded.

And yet every advancement in curing childhood cancer has come through research and that research is working.

Survival rates for childhood cancer have risen sharply over the past 20 years.

In the United States, more than 75 percent of children with cancer are now alive five years after diagnosis, compared with about 60 percent in the mid-1970s.   

Much of this dramatic improvement is due to the development of improved therapies at children's cancer centers, where the majority of children with cancer have their treatment.

Pediatric cancer research has also opened the doors for progress in adult cancer research.

It has

• Increased the overall understanding the basic biology of cancer,
• Provided principles of therapy and advances for other diseases of children and adults.

In addition,

• Chemotherapy was first shown to be effective in curing children with cancer
• The discovery of the first tumor suppressor gene occurred in children with cancer and
• The principle of multi-modal therapy was pioneered in childhood cancer research studies.