Second Primary Tumours in Children

Abstract

The quality of life and late morbidity following treatment for cancer in childhood are matters of increasing concern to clinicians, because approximately 50% of children newly diagnosed with cancer will be alive at 5 years from diagnosis and a large proportion of these will survive to adulthood. With the experience gained from long-term follow-up of these patients, the considerable optimism engendered by the improvements in survival has been tempered by a growing awareness that children who have been successfully treated for one cancer appear to be at risk of developing a second malignancy [1, 2, 3]. The problem of second malignancies is most pertinent to those children who have a relatively good prognosis, for example, children with retinoblastoma, Wilms’ tumour and Hodgkin’s disease. However, following the introduction of effective therapy for children with malignancies which until recently were associated with a poor prognosis, for example, leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, increasing numbers of second tumours are now being observed in children with these diagnoses. Unfortunately, no tumour type appears to be immune to the problem of second malignancy.