Stable incidence, improved survival and lower mortality; these are the results of the first population study in the Netherlands among children and young people under the age of 18 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, over the period 1990 to 2015.
The researchers analyzed the data of 1001 children and young people. The data come from the Dutch Cancer Registry (NKR) and present an almost complete picture of the number of children and young people who were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the period 1990 – 2015.
The study shows that the survival rate 5 years after diagnosis in the early 1990s was approximately 70%. That percentage increased to nearly 90% in the years 2010 to 2015. The improved survival has multiple causes. First of all, treatment protocols have changed since the late 1990s. Since then, less radiotherapy has been given to treat lymphomas, because radiotherapy increases the risk of other tumors in the longer term. Furthermore, since 2004, practitioners increasingly prescribe immunotherapy as a treatment intervention. And young people aged 15 to 17 are treated more often by the pediatric oncologist, who often treats more intensively than adult oncologists and that this leads to better outcomes at group level.
Bron:
IKNL