Your cute baby girl is your joy of life, yet she is suffering from leukemia. A neighbor’s little boy with a gorgeous smile just completed his cancer treatment. Sadly, many precious young lives have been taken away by childhood cancers…
If you’d like to learn ways to protect children from cancer, to help childhood cancer patients, and/or to improve the quality of life for pediatric cancer survivors, you came to the right place.
Let’s start with the challenges of childhood cancer patients and survivors.
Unique risk factors
Children are not “small adults”. In general, their care challenges are attributed to multiple factors, including their growth and development, psychological features, health condition, socioeconomic status, family and cultural dynamics, nurture at home and support outside of the home.
Childhood cancers are full of complexity and unknown. However, some known risk factors for childhood cancer have been established – mainly genetic and non-genetic ones.
Genetic or inherent risk factors include parental age, birth weight and congenital abnormalities. Some pediatric cancer incidences also vary by age, sex, and race or ethnicity.
Non-genetic factors are controllable and preventable, such as
- High-dose radiation (The human fetus is very sensitive to radiation)
- Prior chemotherapy
- Exposure to environmental toxins or carcinogens, pesticides and air pollution
- Exposure to infections – especially related to risk of acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL)
- Pre- and perinatal lifestyle factors: parental diet, maternal smoking, alcohol or marijuana use, maternal medication, etc.
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Things we can help
Keeping these risk factors in mind, each of us can do our part at each stage of a child’s life. Here is a list of things:
- Take a good care during pre-conception and pregnancy period. Unhealthy diet, maternal tobacco or alcohol use, medications and radiation are among the casual link of environmental factors to childhood cancer risk. Particularly, maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with not only childhood cancer but also weight problems, other health and behavior issues. Avoid or minimize your exposure to second-hand and third-hand smoke too.
- Eliminate toxins and carcinogens from home and environment at large. Endless exposure to toxic chemicals through air, water, foods, and products results in a serious impact on public health. Then imagine the threat to pediatric cancer patients and survivors as well as all children, how harmful an early life exposure to toxic chemicals can affect their health decades later. It’s critical to underscore that only a small number of chemical exposures are known – leaving the unknowns are our exposure to many more chemicals in daily life and disease consequences. That’s why environmental protection is vitally important, and a green planet signifies healthful generations.
- Get genetic consultation if you question any genetic abnormality. Evaluate how parents’ occupational, environmental, medical or other exposures may contribute to a child’s cancer risk.
- Prevent childhood obesity. This should start as early as possible. Maternal smoking during pregnancy has been linked to childhood obesity, and that may pose a risk to develop obesity in adult.
- Monitor and control kids’ screen time. The radiation emitted from cell phone has been proposed as “a possible carcinogen for humans” by International Agency for Research on Cancer, though controversies still exist. Given the fact that it poses a cancer risk and cell phone exposure or use often begins from an earlier age, it’s wise to keep cell phone safety in mind.
- Ensure overall health status, such as promoting healthy lifestyle, enough sleep and sun protection.
- Foster individual hygiene and infection prevention.
- Get vaccinated. Parents should encourage and educate their children/teens to have vaccinated against HPV and practice safe sex.
- Team up care from society such as in the school setting and community setting. Family dynamic considerations, socioeconomic status or poverty, violence issues are various factors that contribute to pediatric health challenges.
- Advocate healthcare models or payment changes to ease financial burdens of childhood cancer treatment, and to drive disease prevention.
Last but not the least, improve care and support for pediatric cancer patients and survivors, including all generations of these individuals (i.e. some of them are adults now). Consider what would their life after cancer look like – because of some painful and practical challenges they are facing in daily lives.
Let me elaborate a little more on this. Thanks to medical and technological breakthrough, 5-year survival rates for childhood cancer patients exceed 80%. However, the long-term effects of cancer and its treatment on the quality of life take a huge toll among these survivors.
Specifically, because their treatments take place when they are very young, especially during vulnerable periods of development, the complications from cancer treatment have significant, long-lasting health impacts on these children. The complications of cancer therapy range from impaired growth and development, neurocognitive and psychosocial deficits, cardiovascular diseases, endocrine organ dysfunctions, and gastrointestinal problems.
In addition, children who survive their initial cancers remain at risk for having a cancer recurrence or developing new cancers (secondary malignancies), yet a majority of cancer survivors do not receive risk-based care.
Summary
Cancer impacts our children’s well-being and life. We all have the responsibility to take care of children, and to protect them from a variety of dangers, including interruptions during pregnancy, genetic anomalies, perinatal injuries, congenital defects, malnutrition, environmental hazards, infections, poverty, violence, and trauma. So, we can do a lot to help address their unique needs and find solutions when we open our hearts and minds.
Please share your thoughts and let us know how we can help pediatric cancer patients – via
Support@CancerPreventionDaily.com OR http://www.cancerpreventiondaily.com/contact/
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