| Surviving childhood leukemia
Advances in treatment dramatically improve survival rate in past two decades
Judy Kiessel vividly remembers the day her then 9-year-old daughter, Angela, was diagnosed with cancer.
It was a Sunday afternoon and we were out shopping," recalls Kiessel. "When Angela was trying on a pair of pants I noticed bruises all over her body. It wasn’t normal. When we came home, I called the emergency room right away."
An hour after arriving at the Emergency Department at the University of Michigan Health System, physicians diagnosed Angela with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia that strikes children between the ages of 2 and 10. To fight the disease, Angela would need 2-1/2 years of chemotherapy treatment.
Although Angela’s family was stunned by the devastating diagnosis, Kiessel says her daughter was a "trooper with a smile on her face during treatment." And today, at age 16, Angela has been healthy and cancer-free for five years.
Recent advances in childhood leukemia treatment have given more children like Angela a greater chance of life after cancer. Only 20 years ago, children diagnosed with leukemia had a 50 percent survival rate. Today, due mostly to clinical trials, the cure rate is 85 percent and still improving, says Valerie Castle, M.D., a pediatric oncologist and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the U-M Health System.
"During the past two decades, treatment of leukemia has dramatically changed," notes Castle, who diagnosed and treated Angela more than seven years ago. "There have been a number of remarkable improvements in chemotherapeutic agents, how we treat children, and what we’ve learned about the disease."
Leukemia is a form of cancer that arises from the bone marrow. Sometimes described as blood cancer, it affects the white blood cells, which help the body combat infection. In ALL, immature white blood cells divide uncontrollably, accumulating in the bloodstream, bone marrow and lymph system. This makes the person with leukemia highly susceptible to infections and may cause organ dysfunction. While the exact causes of leukemia are unknown, it is possible that children are genetically predisposed to develop the disorder, and it may be triggered when infections occur during normal growth and development.
But even though it is difficult to pinpoint the specific cause of the disease, children are still winning the war against leukemia. Castle attributes two major factors to the improved survival rates for childhood leukemia. The first is the fact that pediatric oncologists, for the past three decades, have made a point to work closely together to care for children with certain types of cancer, particularly leukemia.
Secondly, due in large part to clinical trials, there have been major advances in chemotherapeutic agents and the way they are used to treat patients. These cooperative treatment trials, Castle says, have allowed pediatric oncologists to figure out which drugs are the most important to use in treating childhood leukemia, as well as how they should time its delivery to the patient.
"For any child diagnosed at our institution, or at any other of the major medical institutions across the country, clinical trials are making it possible to improve their treatment, and they continue to increase children’s chances for survival," says Castle.
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
U-M Pediatric Cancer Information: Childhood Leukemia — Questions and Answers
http://www.cancer.med.umich.edu/learn/leukemia03.htm
U-M Department of Radiation Oncology: Leukemia Clinical Trials
www.med.umich.edu/radonc/clin/clinleu.htm
American Cancer Society: Children’s Leukemia
www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/CRI_2_3x.asp?dt=24
National Cancer Institute: Leukemia
www.nci.nih.gov/cancer_information/cancer_type/leukemia/
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
www.leukemia-lymphoma.org
Contact: Cancer AnswerLine, 1-800-865-1125 |
