Adolescents and young adults have a lower chance of surviving eight common types of cancer than children, a new study has revealed.
Data published last night (26 May, 2016) in The Lancet Oncology from the EUROCARE-5 report, a long-running study of cancer survival across Europe, found that teens and young adults are still more likely to die from some cancers, particularly blood cancers.
Lead author Dr Annalisa Trama at The National Institute of Cancer in Milan, Italy, said: “The good news is that the number of children, adolescents and young adults surviving for at least five years after diagnosis has risen steadily over time in Europe.
“Across all cancers, the level of improvement is similar in these age groups, this contrasts with earlier results that adolescents and young adults diagnosed up to the 1990s were lagging behind children in terms of survival.
“However, we found that adolescents and young adults still tend to die earlier than children for several cancers common to these age groups, particularly blood cancers like leukaemias and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL).”
The research team said a number of factors result in variations in survival between age groups, including: delays in diagnosis and treatment, a lack of treatment guidelines and clinical trials specifically for teenagers and young adults, as well as differences in the biology of some cancers.
For the first time, the latest EUROCARE-5 report includes a comparison of survival between adolescents and young adults (aged 15–39 years), children (aged 0–14 years) and adults (aged 40–69 years), who were diagnosed from 2000 to 2007, and followed-up to at least 2008.
The researchers analysed data from population-based cancer registries covering all or part of 27 European countries and estimated five-year survival for 56,505 cancer cases in children, 312,483 in adolescents and young adults, and 3,567,383 in adults. They also analysed changes in survival over time from 1999 to 2007.
For adolescents and young adults, survival at five years from diagnosis for all cancers combined is 82% (2005–07), which is up from the 1999-2001 period of 79%. In the same period, survival among children increased from 76% to 79%.
While teens and young adults had slightly better five-year survival than children, the overall rates concealed differences between specific cancers, the report says.
The analysts found that survival was significantly worse among teens and young adults compared with children for eight relatively common cancers affecting their groups: acute lymphoid leukaemias (55.6% vs 85.8%), acute myeloid leukaemias (49.8% vs 60.5%), Hodgkin’s lymphoma (92.9% vs 95.1%), NHL (77.4% vs 83.0%), astrocytomas (type of brain tumour; 46.4% vs 61.9%), Ewing’s sarcoma of bone (49.3% vs 66.6%), rhabdomyosarcoma (37.8% vs 66.6%), and osteosarcoma (61.5% vs 66.8%).
Between 1999 and 2007, survival rates remained unchanged for adolescents and young adults for other common cancers, including acute myeloid leukaemia (about 50%), soft-tissue sarcomas (about 70%), and fibrosarcomas (about 80%).
The latest data analysis pre-dates recent initiatives to improve outcomes for adolescents and young adults, which have been implemented in several European countries.
Trama A, Botta L, Foschi R et al. Survival of European adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer in 2000–07: population-based data from EUROCARE-5. Lancet Oncol. 26 May, 2016 [abstract]
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