Treatment

Before your child has any treatment, the doctor will explain its aims and will ask you or your child to sign a form to give permission (consent) for the hospital staff to give the treatment.

Many children and young people with cancer are treated on clinical trials. A clinical trial is a medical research study involving people and there are many different types of clinical trial which are essential to developing new methods to prevent, detect…

Surgery is an important part of cancer treatment. Depending on the size and position of the tumour in the body, an operation to remove it may be the first part of treatment.

Chemotherapy is the use of anti-cancer (cytotoxic) drugs to destroy cancer cells. Children usually have a combination of chemotherapy drugs.

Radiotherapy treats cancer by using high-energy rays to destroy cancer cells in a particular part of the body, while doing as little harm as possible to normal cells. The treatment is usually given in the hospital radiotherapy department as a series of…

Immunotherapy drugs target specific cancer cells.

There are many new drugs being developed for children’s cancer that work differently from the way chemotherapy works. These are often called biological agents or targeted drugs. They work by blocking a specific gene or protein that cancer cells have.

Maintenance therapy is used to mop up any remaining cancer cells left after initial intensive treatment. This stage of treatment is used for many, but not all, types of cancer.

These treatments are used for leukaemia but can be used for other cancers as well. A stem cell transplant (sometimes called a bone marrow transplant) allows your child to have much higher doses of chemotherapy than usual. This can improve the chance of…

CAR-T cell therapy is where the patient’s own T-cells are changed in the lab by adding an artificial receptor to the cells (called a chimeric antigen receptor or CAR) to make CAR-T cells.

There are various ways you can help to reduce your child’s chances of infection.

Alternative treatments are unconventional and unproven therapies that aim to treat cancer.