patient and her father
Photo by Rhoda Baer
Results of a large study suggest that adolescent and young adult cancer survivors have an increased risk of hospitalization up to 34 years after their diagnosis.
Cancer survivors with the highest risk of hospitalization were those who had been diagnosed with leukemia, brain cancer, or Hodgkin lymphoma.
Kathrine Rugbjerg, PhD, and Jørgen H. Olsen, MD, of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, reported these results in JAMA Oncology.
The pair examined the risk of hospitalization in 33,555 subjects who had cancer as adolescents or young adults and survived at least 5 years. The subjects were diagnosed from 1943 through 2004, when they were 15 to 39 years of age.
The researchers compared the cancer survivors to a cohort of 228,447 subjects from the general population who were matched to the cancer survivors by sex and year of birth.
All study subjects were followed up for hospitalizations in the Danish Patient Register through December 2010. The median follow-up was 14 years.
There were 53,032 hospitalizations among the cancer survivors, but only 38,423 were expected. So the standardized hospitalization rate ratio (RR) was 1.38.
The highest risks of hospitalization were for diseases of blood and blood-forming organs (RR=2.00), infectious and parasitic diseases (RR=1.69), and malignant neoplasms (RR=1.63).
The overall absolute excess risk of hospitalization for the cancer survivors was 2803 per 100,000 person-years. The highest absolute excess risks were for malignant neoplasms (18%), diseases of digestive organs (15%), and diseases of the circulatory system (14%).
The researchers said these results suggest that survivors of adolescent and young adult cancers face persistent risks for a broad range of somatic diseases that require hospitalization. And the morbidity pattern is highly dependent on the type of cancer being treated.
