Children diagnosed with cancer remain at risk from a variety of serious, long-term complications even years after doctors pronounce them cured.
Now, new research shows that girls treated with radiation for pediatric tumors face a later risk of breast cancer that’s six to seven times as high as that of other women.
About 24% of women treated with chest radiation for any childhood cancer develop breast cancer by age 50. About 30% of women diagnosed as children with Hodgkin lymphoma — a disease treated with higher doses of chest radiation — develop breast cancer by age 50, according to a study to be presented today in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. An average woman’s risk of breast cancer by age 50 is 4%.
In comparison, women who carry a mutation in the gene BRCA1 have a 31% risk of breast cancer by that age, while those with a mutation in the BRCA2 gene have a 10% risk, says study author Chaya Moskowitz of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
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