Creating the West Midlands Childhood Cancer Clinical Cohort

Many children who survive cancer can unfortunately face other health challenges as they grow older. Studies show that even after 30 years, over 70% of survivors have at least one serious health problem. Mental health problems and chronic pain are growing concerns for doctors, survivors, and their families.

Research into these issues requires comprehensive data about a group of childhood cancer survivors that are representative of the wider childhood cancer population. At the moment data like this is not available, and neither is detailed information about treatments and side effects. This makes it hard to know the extent to which treatments might be causing health problems.

In this project, Dr Raoul Reulen, at the University of Birmingham, hopes to address these problems. His team plans to study a group of nearly 4,000 people who were diagnosed with childhood cancer between 1996 and 2022 in the West Midlands.

To ensure they get the full picture, Dr Reulen’s team are combining data from two major sources:

1. The British Childhood Cancer Survivor Study – this covers the health problems survivors faced, including death, further cancers, non-cancer health problems, drug prescriptions, and mental health services they used.
2. The West-Midlands Regional Children’s Tumour Registry – this has detailed records of treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgeries for these individuals.

Together, this data will form the ‘West Midlands Childhood Cancer Clinical Cohort’.  Dr Reulen hopes to use it to understand how cancer types and treatments might relate to long-term mental health and chronic pain problems. In particular, he will look at the long-term use of painkillers and anti-depressants among individuals in the cohort. He will also explore the likelihood of survivors facing other serious health problems that need hospital care.

With this knowledge, doctors could better predict which patients are more likely to face health problems later on and learn how to give them the best care.