Estimating Excess Mortality Following Pediatric and Adolescent Cancer in the U.S.

ABSTRACT The increasing number of long-term survivors of childhood/adolescent cancer are at-risk for premature death resulting from cancer treatment exposures. To better understand the implications of late mortality, we estimated and characterized the magnitude and temporal patterns of annual excess deaths following childhood/adolescent cancers diagnosed in 1975-2016 in the US using SEER 9 registries. We demonstrate for several tumor types that, despite decreasing excess deaths <5.0 years from diagnosis, the total number of excess deaths is not necessarily decreasing due to the growing and aging population of survivors at risk for treatment related late effects.