Word: cancerously
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...term complications that might arise from the powerful poisons they were throwing at their young patients. They simply didn't have to; at best, only half of those children were expected to see their teens. But today, 1 in 1,000 young adults in the U.S. is a childhood-cancer survivor. Since the 1970s, the chance that a child would live for five years after a diagnosis of leukemia or lymphoma, the most common childhood cancers, has risen steadily, from an average of 25% to more than 80% today, outpacing recovery rates for most adult cancers...
Surprisingly, that success owes very little to the development of new cancer drugs. Until 2003, there was no law enabling the Food and Drug Administration to require drug companies to test new medicines in children, in part because of concerns that this would endanger the rights and health of youngsters. Even today anticancer drugs are approved first in adults, leaving children to make do with older classes of medications. So most of the gains have come from wiser use of existing chemotherapy drugs in innovative combinations that are more potent as packages than as individual compounds...
...like any victims of trauma or shock, these youngsters never quite shake the mental and medical legacy of their early illness. They know their victory comes at a price, and science won't let them forget. With every new study of childhood-cancer survivors, evidence of the lingering health dangers from their treatments--heart disease, secondary cancers, cognitive deficits--continues to mount. "Some- times I feel like a walking time bomb," says Dyer...
...doctors are broadening their focus to include the health of not just the child they are treating today but also the adult they could be treating tomorrow. The most extensive study of pediatric-cancer survivors, an ongoing survey by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that began in 1994, has found they are three times as likely as their cancer-free siblings to have a chronic health condition...
Serious heart disease, however, can be prevented with the right screening and follow-up care, and the same is true for many of the other severe health problems that can emerge years after cancer treatments. In previous decades, for instance, girls with Hodgkin's lymphoma were frequently treated with radiation to the chest, putting them at increased risk of developing breast cancer as young women. Screening them at age 25 instead of 40, as usually recommended, can pick up the disease sooner and, it is hoped, give doctors the chance to remove small lesions before they grow or spread. (Radiation...