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Childhood cancer rates rise
Cancer rates among children have been rising in the United Kingdom and Europe over the last 30 years, research has revealed.
While childhood cancer is rare, the overall incidence has increased by 1 per cent a year since the 1970s, and 1.5 per cent a year for adolescents, scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, said in research published in the medical journal Lancet.
Data was collected from 19 countries because the small number of cases in each made it harder to see trends. But the scientists said that when the data was grouped together it was clear the numbers were going up, although there were some differences between western and eastern Europe and some variations in age groups.
“Perhaps the most striking result is the clear evidence of an increase of cancer incidence in childhood and adolescence during past decades and of the acceleration in this trend,” they write.
More difficult is to point to the possible causes. “It is a very difficult question to answer,” said Eva Steliarova-Foucher from IARC. “We can speculate from the results of other studies that there might be changes in childbearing which might affect the changes in the incidence of cancer.”
Some research had shown an association between higher birth weight and leukaemia, she said. But there are many other possibilities. Research in the UK has suggested that viral infections brought in to communities when populations move might be a trigger, she said.
And while many people assumed that pollution was a factor, studies of the possible exposure to hydrocarbons of children with brain tumours found no conclusive evidence. She hoped that the epidemiological evidence they had found would help the research into causes.
The IARC study showed a rise in childhood cancers from 118 per million in the 1970s to 124 in the 1980s to 139 in the 1990s. While there have been improvements in diagnosis, these did not account for the scale of the increase.
The study also revealed that the rise had accelerated. The annual change was less than 1 per cent between the 1970s and 1980s, but 1.3 per cent between the 1980s and 1990s.
There were some differences in the rates between the west and east of Europe, but significant blips could often be accounted for. The high rate of cancer in children in the east in the 1990s was due to 603 thyroid cancer cases in Belarus. Without those, the overall rate in the east dropped below that in the west.
Bogus cures
Thousands of cancer patients may be putting themselves at serious risk by following the advice of websites promoting bogus cures, it was revealed recently.
In some cases, they may be sentencing themselves to death by rejecting conventional treatment in favour of alternative therapies. A study has identified 32 cancer treatments websites that attracted tens of thousands of “hits” each day from around the world. But not one of the numerous treatments and approaches they advocated could be shown to cure or prevent cancer.
In 3 per cent of the cases, the sites actively discouraged patients from using conventional treatments, and 16 per cent did the same indirectly through the information they provided.
Three sites — heall.com and healthy.net, based in the United States, and worldwidehealthcenter.net, based in the UK and Cyprus, were judged to offer advice that was potentially harmful to patients. Professor Edzard Ernst, from the University of Exeter, who co-led the study, said: “This was to us quite an eye-opener and pretty scary stuff. Our conclusion was that a significant proportion of these websites are actually a risk to cancer patients.
“We found that between these 30-odd sites, 118 different cancer ‘cures’ were recommended, complementary treatment which claimed to be able to cure cancer. None of these 118 can be demonstrated to cure cancer.” He said a further 59 preventative treatments were recommended, but again there was no evidence that any of them worked.
Two prime examples of bogus cancer treatments were shark cartilage and ‘laertrial’, which is made from apricot stones. In the first case, the demand for ground-up shark fins had brought two species of shark close to extinction, said Prof Ernst. There was “not a shred of evidence” that it helped cure patients.
There had even been reported cases where cancer patients had died as a result of using products promoted on the internet, added Prof Ernst. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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