More than 80 per cent of children diagnosed with cancer in Spain overcome the disease

Every year on 15 February, International Childhood Cancer Day, a light is shone on young cancer patients in a bid to raise awareness about prompt diagnosis and immediate treatment

Iván Gelibter

Malaga

Thursday, 15 February 2024, 13:34

Going through cancer when you are less than 14 years old is an experience no child should have to live through, but medical advances have allowed, at least in Spain, more than 80% of patients to recover and survive beyond five years after they have been diagnosed.

This is the big figure experts, doctors and psychologists are looking at today (15 February), International Childhood Cancer Day. It started in 2001 in Luxembourg with the aim of making the community aware of the importance of childhood cancer and the need for an immediate diagnosis and adequate treatment.

As the Spanish Association Against Cancer pointed out, childhood cancer includes many diseases with different characteristics, but are divided into two groups: haematological cancers, such as leukaemia, which affect more than 30% of child cancer patients, and lymphomas, which account for 15% of cases, as well as solid tumours, such as brain tumours, which affect 16%.

There are 1,500 cancer diagnoses each year among children aged 0-18 years in Spain, according to the Spanish Federation of Children with Cancer - a very small percentage of the 290,000 diagnoses each year among adults.

In the absence of the figure for 2023, data for 2022 showed a total of 76 cases of childhood cancer and 18 bone marrow transplants detected by professionals from the paediatric and paediatric haematology units at the Hospital Materno-Infantil in Malaga. According to the centre's own data, there were 60 tumours and 16 new cases of leukaemia in children under 14 years of age. In 2021, some 70 cases were detected, a slight increase over the past twelve months.

Despite the survival data, cancer is the leading cause of death up to the age of 14 in Spain, with leukaemia the most frequent type of cancer (27%), followed by tumours of the central nervous system (22.6%) and lymphomas (12.4%), according to the Spanish Registry of Childhood Tumours.

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