Adolescent and Young Adult Survivors
Adolescent and young adult (AYA) survivors, often defined as being between the ages of 15-39, have seen advancements in technology and modern medicine causing a dramatic increase in the number of AYA survivors. Prior to 1970, being diagnosed with cancer during childhood was considered a universally fatal disease. From 1995 to 2000, however, the 5-year survival rate for children diagnosed with cancer was 80%. Significant progress has been built in the last 25 years as there are now approximately 270,000 survivors of pediatric cancer in the U.S., which translates to approximately 1 in every 640 young young adults being a survivor of childhood cancer. However, as studies have shown, as patient needs increase, the likelihood of having an unmet need also increases. For the AYA population, 2 out of 3 childhood cancer survivors will develop 1 complication due to the therapy they received and 1 out of 3 will develop serious or life-threatening complications, meaning they will most likely need treatment and follow-up care.
An AYA survivor, faces a variety of issues that are unique to their particular age group which differentiate their survivor population from the adult survivor population. Factors that impact educational attainment, employment, marriage and intimacy, fertility, and other life values differ in the emerging young adult compared with the older adult. Data show that AYA survivors have a much greater risk of getting a second primary malignancy as a side effect of the treatment for their original diagnosis. It is believed that AYAs have a much higher relative risk of developing a second primary cancer because the intensity of the treatment for their original diagnosis, typically including any combination of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, is much higher than the level of intensity given to patients over 40. Furthermore, since AYA survivors are diagnosed and treated at such a young age, their length of time being a survivor is much longer than their adult counterparts, making it more likely they will face a second primary cancer in their lifetime.
Read more about this topic: Cancer Survivors
Famous quotes containing the words adolescent, young, adult and/or survivors:
“While the onset of puberty can vary by as much as six years, every adolescent wants to be right on the 50-yard line, right in the middle of the field. One is always too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too hairy, too clear-skinned, too early, too late. Understandably, problems of self-image are rampant.”
—Joan Lipsitz (20th century)
“How distant, the departure of young men
Down valleys....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development,” (1980)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)