Health woes persist for young cancer survivors

who survive cancer when they are teenagers or young adults are more likely than their peers who never had cancer to engage in risky behaviours like smoking later on, a US study said yesterday.

They also are more likely to be overweight and have mental health issues and nancial problems than their cancer-free counterparts, said the research in the journal a peer-reviewed publication of the American Cancer Society.

“There are a lot of factors that play into it,” said lead author Eric Tai of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Cancer.

“Part of it may be that adolescent and young adult cancer survivors are not aware of their medical history and they are not aware of the long-term risks associated with their cancer and their cancer treatment,” he said. “Because of that, they may engage in behaviours not knowing the long-term consequences of them.”

Also, people diagnosed with cancer between age 15 and 29 are developmentally very different than older cancer survivors, and so they tend to cope with their illnesses in ways that elders might not, he added.

Finally, they are not being tracked by healthcare providers as well as younger and older patients.

“There hasn’t been very good follow-up of cancer survivors in this group in terms of screening, health checks, those kinds of things looking for early signs of problems that may come up and also looking at risk behaviours.”

The data for the study came from a nationwide survey known as the 2009 Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).

Researchers identi ed people who were diagnosed with cancer when they were adolescents or young adults, and compared their responses to questions about their health to a group of 345,592 cancer-free respondents.

A large majority of the young cancer survivors group was female — 81 per cent — and the most commonly reported type of cancer was cervical (38 per cent) followed by other female reproductive cancers (13 per cent) and melanoma (nine per cent). The young survivors were more likely to smoke (26 per cent compared to 18 per cent in the group that never had cancer) and more of them were obese (31 per cent versus 27 per cent).