BMC Cancer 2008, 8:355 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/8/355 intraspinal neoplasms, retinoblastoma, renal tumours, other specified soft tissue sarcomas, germ cell tumours, trophoblastic tumours and neoplasms of gonads and other malignant epithelial neoplasms and malignant melanomas. The range of proportions is 3.4% to 9.0% (see Additional file 1). For a more detailed discussion of these differences see [7]. Overall, 25.7% of the cases of Turkish descent (n = 456) had died until 2006 compared to 24.6% of cases (n = 8737) with non-Turkish background. For cases diagnosed between 1980 and 2005, the 5-year survival probability was 76.9% for cases of Turkish descent and 77.6% for the comparison group (log-rank test: p = 0.15). We found no sex or age-specific differences between the two groups in the overall survival probabili- ties over the full time period 1980–2005 (Table 2). Stratification by diagnosis group (see Additional file 2) showed generally very similar diagnosis-specific survival probabilities for children of Turkish and non-Turkish descent. We found a statistically significant disadvantage for children with Turkish descent only for the group of leukaemias, myeloproliferative and myelodysplastic dis- eases (76.2% versus 78.4%; p logrank = 0.028), caused by the difference in the largest subgroup of lymphoid leukae- mias (p logrank = 0.013). Further stratification by time of diagnosis (see Additional file 3) revealed a significant overall survival disadvantage of children with Turkish migrant background (64.8% ver- sus 67.8%, p = 0.016) for the period 1980–87, again driven by lymphoid leukaemia. The 5-year survival prob- ability from lymphoid leukaemia diagnosed in the period 1980–87 for non-Turkish children was markedly higher (75.8%) as compared to the Turkish group (62.0%, p < 0.0001) with a rapid dissociation of the respective survival curves (see Figure 1). Further analyses (not shown) revealed no differences in morphological subgroups, age at diagnosis and completeness of follow-up for this partic- ular group sufficiently large to explain this difference. Leu- kaemia cases of Turkish descent both with and without recorded recurrences had similar survival probabilities, but Turkish cases had more frequent recurrences. In the more recent periods, these differences have disappeared (see Figure 1). The 5-year survival probabilities for leukae- mia for cases diagnosed 1996–2005 are remarkably simi- lar between groups and now exceed 80% in both non- Turkish children and those of Turkish descent. Based on small numbers, we found survival probability differences for some diagnosis subgroups and time peri- ods of central nervous system tumours (e.g. astrocytomas: 1980–87 Turkish (3 events) 80%, Non-Turkish (109 events) 70%, p = 0.89; 1996–2005 Turkish (24 events) 70%, Non-Turkish (334 events) 78%, p = 0.067). Some further diagnoses show marked survival disadvantages (e.g other soft tissue sarcomas: 59% (9 events) vs 71% (173 events, p = 0.11) but also advantages (e.g. Rhab- domyosarcoma 78% (13 events) vs 69% (422 events, p = 0.50) in general or in some time periods for children with Turkish descent, but these are all non-significant due to the rarity of tumours and events. Discussion Our data include information from more than 37,000 childhood cancer cases in Germany and show that Turkish and non-Turkish children in Germany nowadays do not differ with respect to survival from childhood cancer. This can be seen as a reflection of the high standard of care granted to children with cancer in Germany, a standard which allows equitable and accessible care to all patient groups irrespective of geographical descent as assessed in our study. The findings of highly comparable cancer sur- vival probabilities are largely consistent across diagnostic, sex and age groups. Only during the early period of the GCCR, from 1980–1987, when registration was not yet quite complete, we did see significant survival disadvan- tages for Turkish children, largely confined to lymphoid Table 2: 5-year survival probabilities for cancers of children with and without Turkish descent, German Childhood Cancer Registry 1980–2005 by sex and age at diagnosis. 5 year survival probability % (number of deaths within 5 years of diagnosis) Turkish descent Non-Turkish p-value, log-rank test All Malignancies Boys Girls Age at diagnosis 0–<1 years 1–<5 years 5–<10 years 10–<15 years 76.9 (400) 77.1 (233) 76.6 (167) 77.5 (37) 79.4 (138) 76.7 (114) 72.9 (111) 77.6 (7823) 77.0 (4483) 78.3 (3340) 77.1 (806) 79.2 (2642) 77.8 (2077) 75.3 (2298) 0.15 0.45 0.19 0.90 0.69 0.21 0.18 Page 4 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)