Cancer risk rises after childhood organ transplant
Staff Writer |
Children given an organ transplant have a substantially higher risk of developing cancer - in some cases up to 200 times higher - than the general population, a new study finds.
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But the individual risk of any one child getting cancer still remains very small, the study authors stressed.
Overall, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) study found that the risk for cancer among children who received transplants was 19 times higher than in the general population.
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was the cancer with a 200 times higher risk. Seventy-one percent of those who developed cancer after a pediatric organ transplant had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the study findings showed.
"We knew going into the study that the risk of lymphoma would be very high," explained Dr. Eric Engels, the study's senior investigator.
"That's been seen in much smaller studies, and it's been seen when researchers have looked at the entire transplant population.
"But we were surprised by how much of the cancer burden in this population of transplant recipients was dominated by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - 71 percent is a really, really high proportion," Engels said. He works in the NCI's division of cancer epidemiology and genetics.
The one bright spot in the study was that although the cancer risk is elevated, most children who receive a transplant don't get cancer.
Fewer than 400 out of nearly 18,000 transplant recipients developed some form of cancer in an average of about four years of follow-up.
In cases where cancer did develop, the researchers said two factors were likely to blame. One is immune-suppressing medications that are necessary after a transplant. The other is the Epstein-Barr virus.
Organ transplant recipients receive immunosuppressant medications after surgery to help the body accept the new organ.
In adults, research has shown these medications put patients at a high risk for a number of cancers because the immune system has trouble keeping cancer cells at bay.
The weakened immune system also puts organ transplant recipients at risk of infections, such as the Epstein-Barr virus. ■
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