LOUISVILLE, Ky. — At one point in time, cancer was thought of as the beginning of the end, but as time passed and science progressed, doctors have developed ways to fight the disease.
Now, a new study from the CDC’s National Center of Health Statistics says that childhood cancer mortality rates have dropped by 24%, from 2.75 deaths per 100,000 in 2001 to 2.10 deaths per 100,000 in 2021.
That study focuses on young people under the age of 20.
Dr. Ashok Raj with Norton Children’s Hospital says the progress is an encouraging sign.
“A lot of the success has come through science. You know, how far, how rapidly we’ve progressed in the last two decades,” Dr. Raj, who’s spent the last 28 years as an oncologist; the last 24 here in Louisville, said.
He says the main childhood cancer in 2001, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, now has close to a 90% survival rate, and other more common cancers are seeing that survival rate tick up as well.
There is a catch though.
Dr. Raj says that new types of cancer, in particular brain cancers, have taken hold as the dominant forms since the turn of the millennium and science hasn’t caught up yet.
"There are still some cancers where the survival rate is less than 10%,” Dr. Raj said.
Dr. Raj says that "survival rate" is also a relative term.
Treatments now-a-days might be well enough to cure one cancer, but that doesn’t mean their battle is over.
“Five-year survival is not the same as 20-year survival rate,” Dr. Raj said. “So, we still lose a lot children from relapse cancer, second cancer, and from the types of treatment that they have received.”
Alaina Kenney is a former cancer patient at Norton. She survived her battle against a Neuroblastoma, which is a type of cancer the grows on developing nerve cells, that started in 2019.
She was nine years old at the time.
“I started doing chemotherapy. I did eight rounds, and the tumor was shrinking every single round, but during the rounds I would get sick, and they would have to postpone another round, or I couldn’t go home right away,” Kenney said.
She described the not being able to go home as one of the hardest parts of her fight.
Kenney signed on to be a part of a clinical trial during her four year battle and said that at the time she didn’t want to participate. She said that the treatments had worn her down and, at the time, following the pill regiment was something she found hard to do.
Reflecting on it now, Kenney said that she was happy she went through with the trial because it will go a long way to developing more medicines that can help save patients like her.
That’s something Dr. Raj hopes more patients will understand.
He says that without participants in clinical trials, we may not have seen the progress that the last 20 years brought.
“We want high cure rates for all cancers, not just select cancers. And not only do we want survival, we want healthy survival,” he said.
That's something he hopes we can strive for in the next 20 years.
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