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Chance of a cure
One of your biggest concerns on learning that your child has cancer may be their chance of being cured.
Due to major advances in treatment, many children treated for cancer now survive into adulthood. Children diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2012 have a 5-year survival rate of 85%. In the 1980s, the 5-year survival rate for all cancers was about 73%.1
Talk to your child’s doctor about your child’s diagnosis, treatment and long-term survival. Long-term survival is also called ‘outlook’ or ‘prognosis’. It on depends several things, including the:
- age of your child at diagnosis
- extent or stage of the cancer
- how the cancer cells look under a microscope (the shape, function and structure of the cells)
- how the cancer responds to treatment
- cancer or tumour biology, which includes
- the patterns of the cancer cells
- how different the cancer cells are from normal cells
- how fast the cancer cells are growing.
To learn more about survival for kidney (renal) tumours in children, visit Australian Cancer Childhood Statistics Online
References
[1] https://cancerqld.blob.core.windows.net/content/docs/Childhood-Cancer-in-Australia-1983-2015.pdf