This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
NCHS data brief: 20% decline in children’s cancer death rate ‘builds upon 3 decades of progress’
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
The U.S. death rate of children and adolescents with cancer continues to decline with a 20% drop over a 15-year span, according to a data brief report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
As a result, the decline was found to be “building upon progress of the previous 3 decades,” Sally C. Curtin, statistician at the CDC, and colleagues wrote.
From 1999 to 2014, the cancer death rate dropped from 2.85 to 2.28 per 100,000 population in all age groups from 1 to 19 years of age.
Rates declined for both white (17%) and black (23%) children and adolescents.
An 18% decrease occurred in males and a 22% decrease occurred in females. However, the death rate for boys was continually higher than for girls, with a 30% higher rate recorded in 2014.
The researchers found that brain cancer replaced leukemia as the most common cancer causing death in children and adolescents, however, both sites accounted for 53.4% of cancer deaths in this age group during the study period.
In 1999, three out of 10 cancer deaths among children and adolescents were caused by leukemia (29.7%). One in four patients died of brain cancer, accounting for 29.9% of cancer deaths in 2014.
Other common sites of cancer-causing death during the study period included bone and articular cartilage (10.1% in 2014), thyroid and other endocrine glands (9%) and mesothelial and soft tissue (7.7%) — which together accounted for more than 81.6% of cancer deaths among children and adolescents in 2014.
“Major therapeutic advances in treating some forms of cancer, particularly leukemia, may have resulted in increased survivorship,” Curtin and colleagues wrote. – by Kristie L. Kahl
References: