Projects we fund

Overview

Children, teenagers and young adults who survive cancer can then face long-term health impacts as a result of their disease and the intense treatments they received, however, these impacts are poorly understood. While some previous research has been conducted in this area, this has been constrained by certain limitations.

1. Until now, there has not been national data available about GP prescriptions for survivors.
2. Until now, there has not been national data available about the use of mental health facilities in the community by survivors.
3. Until now, the long-term NHS healthcare costs relating to survivors have not been investigated.

Prof. Mike Hawkins and his team will address and overcome each of these three limitations in their new population study. A lot of work has already been done to establish a national registry of survivors of childhood cancer, named the British Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (BCCSS), and a separate national registry of survivors of teenage and young adult cancer named the Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Survivor Study (TYACSS). Prof. Hawkins and his team plan to extend these two registries of survivors in several ways so that they can track the long-term health of survivors in a more complete way than was possible in the past. The BCCSS and TYACSS are the largest registries of survivors of childhood and young person cancer in the world and date back to the 1960s, giving the longest follow-up data available to understand life-long health impacts. This means Prof. Hawkins and his team are in position to carry out some of the most comprehensive monitoring of survivors currently possible.

What difference will this project make?

There is no comprehensive national system to monitor adverse health outcomes among the entire population of survivors of childhood, teenage and young adult cancer in Britain. However, there already exists two established national population-based cohorts of such survivors. Prof. Hawkins and his team aim to use these cohorts to establish a system to monitor the risks of adverse health outcomes and healthcare costs among these survivors, and to determine how observed risks and costs compare with those expected from the general population. This will help to identify subgroups of survivors who experience substantially increased risk. Such large-scale and population-based investigations of risk would provide the most reliable and unbiased evidence available nationally for supporting survivors in the long term, guiding clinical practice and influencing health policy.