Surviving Cancer Can Develop Problems

Scientists claimed that surviving cancer as a child could, later on, develop into a series of other complications. A new study has proved that some of the former cancer patients who managed to combat the disease are currently experiencing severe problems. Despite the fact that their cancer treatments and therapies have demonstrated positive results, survivors have later developed health complications.

One of the patients who experienced such a terrible phenomenon is Jasmine Jean. She treated for cancer approximately 30 years ago. Cancer disappeared, but some effects still linger. She stated that the side effects with which she has lately confronted to prove that her fight was not enough.

She started thinking that she was never completely cured. Jean was diagnosed with the muscle cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma at the age of two. She has treated right away, and cancer seemed to diminish. According to the new study based on the reports of those surviving cancer, many patients who managed to surpass the disease and got cured are now suffering some health problems.

Some of those surviving cancer have argued that their state of health did not feel as if it improved after the therapies and the treatments ended. They feel as if they are still ill, even if the cancer was proved to be long gone. The new research was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine magazine.

The research aimed to analyze the health forms fill out by approximately 14,000 cancer survivors who were treated starting with 1970 to 1999. The study was conducted by researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Those patients who were previously treated for leukemia or bone cancer had reported experiencing even more severe effects than those patients who got cured of the same disease just a decade back. Dr. Wendy Leisenring, who is a biostatistician at Freud Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has analyzed the information gathered from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study.

She analyzed the data and argued that this study was discouraging because she has lately noticed an improvement in mortality rates. Jean had finished her cancer treatment before she was five years old. Nowadays, at the age of 36, she can clearly remember her days in the hospital, recalling the pain and the suffering she had been through. The effects of the radiation processes had remained I her body.

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