Cancer risk with radiotherapy

Radiation treatments for childhood cancers is unlikely to lead to malignant melanoma. Some long-term studies have suggested that nearly 10 percent of childhood cancer survivors may subsequently develop tumours with reports of an increase in childhood and adolescent melanomas.However, researchers from the National Institute of Public Health and Medical Research, France, said that though radiation-induced melanoma does exist as a complication of radiation therapy, it is rare. They studied about 30,000 children treated for cancer from Nordic countries, the UK and France. They found that as children survive longer after cancer, the risk of subsequent cancers increases. However, there were only 16 cases of malignant melanoma in about 20 years, and those occurred only in areas of the skin that had received large doses of radiation. Thus, radiotherapy should not be considered as a public health problem for survivors of childhood cancers.