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St. Michael’s Hospital
Up to 20 years after they are declared cancer-free, young adult (YA) cancer survivors are still hospitalized more often than the general population, according to research published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Overall, the cancer survivors, who were ages 20 to 44 at diagnosis, were hospitalized about 1.5 times as often as control subjects.
“Even when young adults survive cancer, the cancer still has an impact on their lives and their long-term health, and this age group still has a lot of life to live,” said study author Nancy Baxter, MD, PhD, of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
To conduct this study, Dr Baxter and her colleagues examined data from the Ontario Cancer Registry spanning the period from 1992 to 1999.
This included 20,275 patients who had their first cancer diagnosis between the ages of 20 and 44 and had lived for 5 years cancer-free. The researchers compared hospitalizations among these patients to hospitalizations in 101,344 non-cancer controls.
During the study period, 34.3% of cancer survivors (n=6948) were admitted to the hospital. The adjusted relative rate (ARR) of hospitalizations in survivors compared to controls was 1.51.
There was a significant decrease in hospitalizations among cancer survivors from the first time point the researchers analyzed to the last time point (P<0.0001).
But hospitalizations were more common among cancer survivors regardless of the time point. The ARR was 1.67 at 5 to 8 years after cancer diagnosis and 1.22 at 18 to 20 years after diagnosis.
When the researchers looked at individual malignancies, they found that survivors of melanoma or testicular cancer did not have higher rates of hospitalization than the control population. The ARRs were 0.97 and 1.07, respectively.
However, the rate of hospitalization was at least twice as high as the control population for survivors of leukemia (ARR=2.23) and lymphoma (ARR=2.02), as well as gastrointestinal (ARR=2.49), urologic (ARR=2.20), colorectal (ARR=2.10), and brain cancers (ARR=2.04).
Dr Baxter said having a better understanding of healthcare utilization and late effects in the YA cancer population may help healthcare providers counsel YA survivors on their future quality of life, identify areas where preventative strategies could be employed, and highlight the need to consider treatments that are not associated with long-term health consequences.
