About Childhood Cancer
About Childhood Cancer
Additional Statistics
- 96% of Federal funding for research is for adult cancers, leaving only 4% for childhood cancers, yet kids make up 20% of our population
- Funding from large cancer organization doesn’t help too much; Less than 1% of American Cancer Society total donations is directed towards childhood cancer research
- Pharmaceutical companies fund 60% of all adult cancer research but they do virtually no childhood cancer research because it’s not profitable
- About 900 Adult cancer drugs are in the drug development pipeline and almost none for children’s cancers
- Childhood cancers are considered rare although worldwide over a quarter million kids are diagnosed annually
- Here in the US about 1 in 285 Kids are diagnosed with cancer before age 20, about 16,000/year
- The incidence of childhood cancer has increased about 29% over the last 20 years
- Here in the US, 80% of kids survive 5 years; but 20% of those survive die prematurely due to the original cancer, a secondary cancer of effects of treatments
- 98% of survivors suffer from a chronic health condition by the age of 45, including pulmonary, hearing, cardiac and other problems related to the cancer of the cancer treatment
- Overall, childhood cancers are the #1 disease killer of US Kids, taking more kids every year than every other disease that effects kids combined, and worldwide nearly 100,000 die annually
- Worldwide, a child is diagnosed every 3 minutes
- Every day, 42 children are diagnosed with cancer
- 37% survive more than one year, 20% survive 2 years. and 13% survive 3 years
- DIPG has a 0 percent survival rate
- The median overall survival of children diagnosed with DIPG is approximately 9 months
Sources:
http://seer.cancer.gov/publications/childhood/
http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/pdfs/FY13/Vol%202%20-%20Significant%20items.pdf
http://www.cancer.gov/researchandfunding/snapshots/pediatric
http://kidsvscancer.org
http://thecurestartsnow.org
