Do scans during follow-up improve survival rates?

The follow-up of children who have been treated for cancer currently involves reviews by their medical team as well as scans, which hope to find any relapse of their cancer early. Having many scans has some problems including increasing the risk of another cancer from radiation, having many anaesthetics, and increasing anxiety for families. There are also high costs to the NHS. Some small research studies have shown that most children’s cancer is found because they develop symptoms of the disease, instead of being found on scans. They also suggest that finding cancer on scans does not prevent children from dying of their cancer. However, the studies were not big enough to tell us for sure whether scans help of not.

This project will perform a ‘systematic review’, where the team gathers together all of the studies that have ever looked at using scans to detect relapsed cancer. The results of these studies can then be combined to give a more accurate answer as to whether scans mean that children with relapsed cancer live for longer. The team will look to see whether different information, like the age of the child or the type of cancer, means that scans are more helpful or less helpful.

The funding for this project will help the team involved patients and families in designing the work, so that the team answer the most important questions, and present their findings in a way that is easy to understand. The funding will also be used to perform a search for all of the relevant studies and to access written reports of the studies. Finally, the findings will be given to all teams who treat children with cancer, so that the results can make a difference in the real world.