According to a study published in The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia Journal, India’s first-ever registry of childhood cancer survivors reported a 94.5% five-year overall survival rate and nearly 90% event-free survival.
The Indian Childhood Cancer Survivorship (C2S) study, launched in 2016, is among the first such registry in the world from a resource-limited setting, researchers said, news station PTI reported.
A look at the numbers
The team, including researchers from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre, New Delhi, looked at 5,419 children diagnosed with cancer before the age of 18 and in remission after treatment from 20 centers across the country. Survival data were available for 5,140 participants.
Acute leukemia was found to be the most common diagnosis (40.9%), while common therapeutic strategies included chemotherapy for 94.7% of participants, surgery for 30%, and radiotherapy for 26.3%.
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“Five-year overall survival (OS) and event-free survival (EFS) for the entire cohort were 94.5% and 89.9%, respectively,” the authors wrote.
The five-year overall survival rate is the percentage of patients who are alive five years after their initial diagnosis or starting treatment, while the event-free survival rate is the number of patients who remain free of certain complications after primary cancer treatment ends.
In 2,266 survivors who were followed for at least two years after treatment, the five-year overall survival was 98.2% and the event-free survival was 95.7%.
The authors report that the C2S cohort can serve as a model for similar resource-constrained settings and also highlights collaboration between public and private sector institutions from all four regions of the country—East, West, North, and South.
In addition, the study may help inform policy-relevant research regarding childhood cancer survival, the team said.
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Late effects are likely to appear months or years after cancer treatment is completed, with one-third to one-half of childhood cancer survivors estimated to have a long-term or late effect of therapy — up to half of which can be life-threatening, the researchers said.
However, data on the prevalence of late effects in child cancer survivors from low- and middle-income countries, including India, are limited, they said.
“The C2S study represents the first structured attempt to build a nationwide cohort of pediatric cancer survivors in India,” the authors wrote.
The cohort “paves a way to address the evidence gap on childhood cancer survival in low- and middle-income countries – providing a means to examine long-term outcomes, treatment exposures and late effects in the Indian context,” they said.
