Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital studied the health of survivors of childhood cancers to determine the prevalence of treatment complications following cancer treatment-related exposures such as chemotherapy and radiation. The researchers found that long term survivors had a higher incidence of impaired pulmonary, auditory, cardiac, endocrine, and nervous system function problems.
The large study provides information about the various organ systems evaluated in this large group of long-term survivors of childhood cancer. The percentage of survivors with 1 or more chronic health conditions prevalent in a young adult population was very high. These data underscore the need for medical monitoring, both for conditions that have significant risk of death if not detected and treated early, such as second malignancies and heart disease, and also for those that if remediated can improve quality of life, such as hearing loss and vision deficits.
This research study was originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association