WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People who have survived childhood leukemia are much more prone to develop other types of cancer in the decades after their original cancer treatment, a study published on Tuesday found.
Researchers tracked 2,169 people treated as children and adolescents between 1962 and 1998 at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It is a form of cancer in which the bone marrow makes too many of a kind of white blood cell.
Their cancer had gone into complete remission, and their health was monitored for an average of 19 years.
The researchers, writing in the
Journal of the American Medical found that the childhood leukemia survivors were 13.5 times more likely than the general population to develop the most serious types of cancer.
In addition, the incidence of new cancers increased steadily for these cancer survivors over the 30 years after their leukemia treatment, the study found.http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070321/hl_nm/cancer_leukemia_dc
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