More than 1 million cancer survivors live with minor children

About 14% of U.S. cancer survivors — or 1.5 million people — live with children younger than 18 years, according to data from the United States National Health Interview Survey. This means that about 2.85 million children live with a parent who has survived cancer, according to research estimates.

Children who have parents diagnosed with cancer may experience emotional, social, behavioral or physical functioning problems, according to background information in the study. In order to better understand the number of children affected, researchers identified adults with a history of cancer (n=13,385) who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 2000 to 2007.

Of these adults, 14% lived with at least one of their minor children. Most of the survivors were female (78.9%), married (69.8%) and younger than 50 years (85.8%).

The researchers identified about 12% of these adults as having survived childhood or adolescent cancer; 32.3% of patients were diagnosed with cancer in their 20s and 28.3% were diagnosed in their 30s.

Using population-based weights for the adult sample, the researchers calculated that about 1.58 million U.S. cancer survivors live with a minor child. This equated to an estimated 2.85 million U.S. children younger than 18 years of age.

If recently diagnosed cancer survivors — those diagnosed within 2 years — were included, this estimate increased to 18.3% of U.S. survivors living with a minor child.

On average, survivors were about 7.9 years from their cancer diagnosis.

Writing in an accompanying editorial, Paula Rauch, MD, and Cynthia Moore, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, stressed the need to direct funding to programs that will address the needs of these children.

“If these numbers fully accounted for all the children affected, there would be reason enough to re-examine our strategies for psychosocial care of adults with cancer. But as the authors underscore, these data underestimate the numbers of affected children, most notably by omitting noncustodial parents and children who have already experienced a parent’s death from cancer. Furthermore, the cutoff of 18 years of age that defines minors does not reflect the ongoing need for substantial parenting support for older adolescents (aged 19-23 years),” they wrote.

“Given such a broad impact, it is surprising that there has not been a more concerted effort to develop clinical approaches to meeting disparate family needs, to disseminate knowledge to providers in the best position to help, and to advance research on the psychosocial aspects of living with parental cancer.”

Weaver KE. Cancer. 2010;doi:10.1002/cncr.25368.

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