A child with cancer must be diagnosed precisely and treated by clinical and laboratory scientists who have expertise in the management of children with cancer. Such teams are found only in major children's hospitals, university medical centers and cancer centers. The bones may be the site to which other cancers spread, but some types originate in the skeleton. The most common bone cancer is osteogenic sarcoma. Ewing s sarcoma differs from osteosarcoma in that it affects the bone shaft, and tends to be found in bones other than the long bones of the arm and the leg, such as the ribs.
Some tumors are benign, and some children can be cured by surgery.
But there has been less dramatic progress in treating brain cancer tumors than most other childhood malignancies because they are hard to diagnose and treat. Twenty percent of all primary brain tumors arise in children younger than age 15, somewhat more in boys than girls. There is a peak in incidence between the ages of 5 and 10. When leukemia strikes, the body makes an abundance of abnormal white cells that do not perform their proper functions. They invade the marrow and crowd out the normal healthy blood cells, making the patient susceptible to infection and bruising.