BMC Cancer Research article Cancer survival among children of Turkish descent in Germany 1980–2005: a registry-based analysis Claudia Spix1, Jacob Spallek*2, Peter Kaatsch1, Oliver Razum2 and Hajo Zeeb3 BioMed Central Open Access Address: 1German Childhood Cancer Registry (GCCR), Institute for Medical Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics (IMBEI), Obere Zahlbacher Straße 69, 55131 Mainz, Germany, 2Department of Epidemiology & International Public Health, School of Public Health, Bielefeld University. P.O. Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany and 3Institute for Medical Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics (IMBEI), Obere Zahlbacher Straße 69, 55131 Mainz, Germany Email: Claudia Spix - spix@imbei.uni-mainz.de; Jacob Spallek* - jacob.spallek@uni-bielefeld.de; Peter Kaatsch - kaatsch@imbei.uni-mainz.de; Oliver Razum - oliver.razum@uni-bielefeld.de; Hajo Zeeb - zeeb@imbei.uni-mainz.de * Corresponding author Published: 28 November 2008 BMC Cancer 2008, 8:355 doi:10.1186/1471-2407-8-355 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/8/355 Received: 20 August 2008 Accepted: 28 November 2008 © 2008 Spix et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Little is known about the effect of migrant status on childhood cancer survival. We studied cancer survival among children of Turkish descent in the German Cancer Childhood Registry, one of the largest childhood cancer registries worldwide. Methods: We identified children of Turkish descent among cancer cases using a name-based approach. We compared 5-year survival probabilities of Turkish and other children in three time periods of diagnosis (1980–87, 1988–95, 1996–2005) using the Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank tests. Results: The 5-year survival probability for all cancers among 1774 cases of Turkish descent (4.76% of all 37.259 cases) was 76.9% compared to 77.6% in the comparison group (all other cases; p = 0.15). We found no age- or sex-specific survival differences (p-values between p = 0.18 and p = 0.90). For the period 1980–87, the 5-year survival probability among Turkish children with lymphoid leukaemia was significantly lower (62% versus 75.8%; p < 0.0001), this remains unexplained. For more recently diagnosed leukaemias, we saw no survival differences for Turkish and non-Turkish children. Conclusion: Our results suggest that nowadays Turkish migrant status has no bearing on the outcome of childhood cancer therapies in Germany. The inclusion of currently more than 95% of all childhood cancer cases in standardised treatment protocols is likely to contribute to this finding. Background Mortality from childhood cancer has been declining for almost all cancers in most industrialised countries. 5 year- survival probabilities have been improving between 30% and 50% for childhood cancers evaluated by European registries when comparing the period 1978–1982 to the period 1993–1997 [1]; survival probabilities have improved further in more recent years (see for example data from http://www.kinderkrebsregister.de). This is due to increasingly effective and highly standardised therapeu- Page 1 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)