Chances of cure for children
Every year, about 500,000 people in Germany are diagnosed with cancer, about 1800 of them are under 14 years old. About 150 children are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in Germany every year. In children, blood cancers and lymph gland cancers are among the cancers that can be treated most successfully.
After an early diagnosis, treatment is started very quickly and can sometimes take up to a year. As a rule, children do not yet have any underlying diseases that could complicate the treatment of lymph gland cancer and drastically reduce the chances of recovery. Presumably, the still very intact tissue and the well-trained immune system of the young patients are partly responsible for the fact that therapies are tolerated very well, that side effects occur less frequently than in adults and that the disease can thus be treated more successfully. Between 80 and 95 % of all children who develop lymph gland cancer are cured, but long-term side effects of the treatment, which can occur even 20-30 years later, are not included in the calculation. Very often, after a long period of time after the primary treatment, the cancer recurs.
Chances of recovery in case of recurrence
If, after initially successful treatment of a lymph gland cancer, the disease recurs, this is called a relapse. Unfortunately, if a relapse occurs after primary treatment, the chances of recovery decrease. This is due on the one hand to the fact that recurrent diseases are usually much more aggressive than the primary disease, and on the other hand to the fact that the available treatment options are no longer as effective and are no longer readily accepted by the body.
On the other hand, some treatment options for recurrent diseases can only be used to a limited extent or not at all (for example, radiation). It must also be taken into account that the body can be very weakened by the initial treatment and no longer has the defenses to easily survive a new treatment. In most cases, second-line therapy is started as soon as a relapse is diagnosed, but in some cases this treatment has to be discontinued due to too many side effects.
Often, the desired therapeutic success is not achieved after the start of second-line treatment, which is evident, for example, in the progression of the disease under therapy. In this case the treatment would be discontinued.
