Facts & Figures

Childhood Cancer Fact Sheet:

• Cancer is leading cause of death by disease in children, despite dramatically increased survival rates for certain types of childhood cancer.
• There are many different types of childhood cancer each with a different outcome.
• Living 5 years after a diagnosis of cancer depends on a child's age, the location and type of cancer
• Overall, children with leukemia now have an 80% chance of survival.
• If a child is between 15- and 19-years-old, there is a 51% chance of surviving acute leukemia; if an infant develops leukemia, survival is only 33%.
• Children with brain tumors, the most common solid tumor in childhood, have a 65% chance of surviving 5 years
• Brain tumors are now the leading cause of cancer death in children under age 15.
• Each year, about 12,400 children are diagnosed with cancer and 2,300 die.

State-of-the-art treatments in high quality clinical trials through the Children's Oncology Group and National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers and consortia offer the best hope for children with all types of cancer. Eliminating childhood cancer depends on the discovery of new therapies that target specific disease, spare healthy tissue, and leave minimal long-term, damaging effects.

SOURCE: Ries LAG, Smith MA, Gurney JG et al. (eds.) Cancer Incidence and Survival Among Children and Adolescents: United States SEER Program 1975-1995: Bethesda, MD: National Cancer Institute, SEER Program. NIH Pub. No. 99-4649; 1999.

Current Statistics

Childhood cancers in the United States are orphan diseases with thousands of young victims and little support. An estimated 12,400 children and young people will be diagnosed with cancer in the year 2005 and 1,585 children will die from the disease. Some progress has been made, however. For example, survival rates for a common childhood cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, have risen from 43 percent to 79 percent in the last two decades. Yet cancer is still the leading cause of death by disease in children under 15: It knows no social, economic or ethnic boundaries.

It is widely recognized that the progress in cancer survival rates among children is the result of successful clinical trials, where work from our nation's laboratories is translated into clinical application. For children, the standard of care today is to be treated in a clinical trial, and more than 70 percent of children with cancer participate. That compares to only about 3 percent of adults (and only 1.5 percent of Medicare patients) with cancer who are enrolled in clinical trials.

The triumphs over childhood cancer are to be celebrated, but there continue to be limitations on pediatric cancer research. Just a small fraction of the dollars spent on research in this country is directed to pediatric cancer. Each child diagnosed with cancer is getting only one-sixth the federal research support allocated to each patient afflicted with AIDS (when calculated per life year saved). And, for every dollar spent on a patient with breast cancer, less than 30 cents is spent on a child with cancer.

Source: American Cancer Society Facts and Statistics 2005.