Scientists have analyzed that children who have birth defects are more likely going to develop a cancerous disease than children without any birth defects.
However, they claim this by over-looking certain factors like the age, the spreading of cancer inside the body, and the type of cancer the child has been diagnosed with.
Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Texas’s Children Hospital studied 13,000 children who have been diagnosed with cancer but had no birth defects and 1600 children who have both cancer and birth defects.
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However, children with syndromes caused by chromosome mutations like Down syndrome and neurofibromatosis were not included in this part of the study.
The researchers discovered that in some types of cancer like acute lymphoblastic leukemia there were only 12.4% child patients with birth defects but the numbers raised under the category of tumors at the embryonic origin, neuroblastoma (12.5%) and hepatoblastoma (5%)
Dr. Jeremy Schraw, who works in the Center of Epidemiology and Population Health at Baylor and is an oncology pediatrics instructor as well.
He claimed that the team gathered data of 28 different types of cancer diagnosed in people part of the population in four states of the U.S and then they closely analyzed the difference in frequencies in children, diagnosed with cancer with and without any birth defects.
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He also claimed that he and his team found out that children with birth defects were diagnosed with cancer one or two years earlier than children without any defects.
Thus, such children were to develop these cancerous diseases at earlier stages than normally diagnosed and treated in the overall pediatric population.
He proceeded to tell that there was no constant or smooth trend seen in the frequencies of children cancer patients with birth defects.
Thus, the age of the child is not the only factor that can result in a child suffering from cancer at early stages, however, there were other reasons behind this. Lastly, he said that the overall risk is low even though there is a higher chance of a child born with a defect to get cancer at the early stages if his or her life.
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Other doctors hoped that these researches and studies would help them to understand the roots of cancer more and these findings could be used for the betterment of medical and cancer-treatment facilities.
