October 11, 2019
But research shows that even if they are cured, survivors aren’t out of the woods: Chemotherapy and radiation treatments can leave survivors at risk for a host of later-in-life complications, including cardiac disease and secondary cancers. Female childhood cancer survivors—even if they did not receive radiation treatments to their chest—are six times more likely than the general population to be diagnosed with breast cancer. For those who did receive chest radiation, that chance increases exponentially and is on par with those who have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. Tara Henderson, MD, MPH, a hematologist/oncologist at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital and director of the Childhood Cancer Survivors Center, has spent her career studying outcomes and potential interventions for this group. Recently, she and her collaborators set out to discover whether survivors diagnosed with breast cancer had the same mortality rate as breast cancer patients who had previously been cancer-free.
medicalxpress.com, September 13, 2019. Link.
