Childhood Cancer
There are significant differences between childhood cancer and adult cancer. The good news is that childhood cancer has a high cure rate.Eric Larsen, MD
Pediatric Oncologist, Norris Cotton Cancer Center
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Childhood cancer is different from adult cancer on many different levels. To start with, cancer in adults is fairly common, in fact one in three adults at some point in their life will have a serious about with cancer, whereas with children--it's extremely rare for children to have cancer. So there's a marked difference between the incidence or prevalence of cancer between children and adults. Another difference between cancers in children and adults is that most adult cancers are felt to be due to something that's happened in their environment. If you combine smoking and dietary indiscretions, approximately 70-85% of adult cancers can be attributed to those environmental factors. With childhood cancer, we have looked long and hard for environmental factors that may cause cancer in young people and there's never been any clear environmental factor that's been discovered, with the rare exception of contaminated water or exposure to radiation. Most children with childhood cancer don't have any particular factor that we can determine, be it genetic or environmental.
The diseases themselves--the cancers that affect children--re biologically different from the cancers that affect adults. With very rare exceptions, we do have some malignant diseases that do affect teenagers and younger adults, but by and large most of the diseases that pediatric oncologists deal with are fundamentally different diseases and thus are treated much differently than adult cancers are.
Many of the cancers that affect children are what we call embryomas. An embryoma is a derivation of embryo, and they are in fact--if you look at many childhood cancers under the microscope, they look like normal tissues in the embryo or in the fetus, and many people have referred to childhood cancer, particularly the solid tumors, as recapitulation of fetal development. So we know just from their appearance under the microscope that they're much different from the adult cancers that we see. Since there is a tendency for some of these tumors to be a recapitulation of fetal development, some strategies in childhood cancer are targeting an attempt to differentiate the diseased tissues back to a normal state; so many of the forms of therapy are quite different.
Probably the most striking difference or contrast between childhood cancer and adult cancer is childhood cancer is much more curable than adult cancer. If you look at all forms of childhood cancer approximately two out of every three children who are diagnosed with cancer will not only survive their disease but will survive in a healthy manner and live to grow up to be healthy adults, whereas the survivability of adult cancer overall is much less than 50%.