Adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors face nearly a two-fold higher risk of dying from a new primary cancer compared with peers in the general population, new research shows.
"These findings underscore the critical role of providing high-quality, post-treatment survivorship care to reduce the risk of subsequent cancers," lead investigator Hyuna Sung, PhD, with the American Cancer Society, said in a news release. "Given the younger age at diagnosis, there often should be more opportunities for prevention and early detection of subsequent cancers in this survivor group," Sung added.
The study was published online May 4 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
To date, few studies have explored the risk of new primary malignancies and death among AYA cancer survivors.
In the new analysis, Sung and colleagues set out to better understand this risk. The researchers analyzed data on 170,404 AYA cancer survivors aged 15 to 39 years included in Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries between 1975 and 2013 who survived at least 5 years since their first primary cancer diagnosis.
During a median follow-up of 14.6 years, the authors identified 13,420 subsequent primary cancer cases and 5008 subsequent primary cancer deaths, excluding those attributed to the original cancer site.
