CANCER FACTS Hope. Help. Healing.™ Cancer is diagnosed each year in about 175,000 children ages 14 and under worldwide. Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease past infancy for U.S. children. However, thanks to better therapies, more than 80% of U.S. childhood cancer patients now become long-term survivors. Less than 4% of the federal budget for cancer research is dedicated to childhood cancer. Each day, 43 children are diagnosed with cancer in the United States, which means 15,590 children in the U.S. are diagnosed each year. Childhood cancer is the number one disease killer of children in the U.S. Cancer is the leading disease-related cause of death for children and adolescents ages 1-19, and 1 in 264 children and adolescents will develop cancer before the age of 20. Every two minutes a child is diagnosed with cancer. That’s 300,000 kids around the world every year. The average age of a child diagnosed with cancer is 6. But you don’t have to be a child to be diagnosed with childhood cancer. Childhood cancers are diagnosed in all ages, from newborn infants to children and young adults. 80% of children diagnosed with cancer are in developing countries. Childhood cancer is a global problem. The most common childhood cancer is acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). In the 1950s, almost every kid with ALL died. But today, thanks to childhood cancer research, about 90% of children with the most common form of ALL will survive. There are still types of ALL that have far lower survival rates. In 80% of kids with cancer, the cancer has already spread to other areas of the body by the time it is diagnosed. That’s why so many children with cancer need to begin treatment right away. Much of what we know about treating adult cancers has been learned from childhood cancer research. Some aspects of cancer treatment today, such as combination chemotherapy, can be traced to pediatric cancer research. There are over a dozen types of childhood cancer and hundreds of different subtypes. The more rare types, when added together, account for about 30% of cancers in children and adolescents. But because so few children are diagnosed with each type, it’s very difficult to do research on these cancers. One in five children diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. will not survive. For the ones who do, the battle is never over. Because of the treatments they had as kids, more than 99% of childhood cancer survivors have a chronic health problem and 96% have severe or life-threatening conditions. By the time they’re 50 years old, survivors of childhood cancer experience about 5 severe or life-threatening chronic health conditions on average. Contact Us Main Telephone: 661.250.4100 Email: mail@mhf.org Federal tax ID: 95-4565741 Follow Us © 2021 All Rights Reserved – Privacy Policy