At what age does childhood cancer most often occur?
Childhood cancer most often strikes very young children. For that reason, even though it causes a relatively small number of deaths, childhood cancer leads to many years of lost life — about 70 per child who does die. Forty percent of cases occur in children under five, with most occurring in children less than a year old. The frequency of cancer then decreases, but rises again when children reach adolescence. Which cancers affect children most often? Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer, representing 31.5 percent of cases in children under 15. Next most common are central nervous system cancers including brain cancer (20.2 percent), lymphomas including Hodgkin’s disease and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (10.7 percent), neuroblastoma and other cancers of the nerves (7.8 percent), soft tissue sarcomas (7 percent), kidney cancers (6.3 percent) and cancer of the bones (4.5 percent). The patterns of these cancers vary by age. For infants, neuroblastoma is the most common form, accounting
