Persone vive dopo una diagnosi di tumore in eta' pediatrica.

Individuals cured from a cancer diagnosed in their childhood represent a subgroup of the population of interest from both epidemiological and healthcare management perspectives. Nowadays, the prognosis of many childhood cancers is fairly good and most young patients become long-term survivors. Potentially, these patients require extra medical care because of the disease psychological and physical consequences, such as the increased risk of selected conditions (in particular, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and infertility problems) or subsequent cancers due to the aggressiveness of the treatments, which may persist throughout their life. Information on the number of survivors after childhood cancer and their demographical characteristics represents a first step necessary to evaluate their healthcare needs in the medium and long terms. Estimates of prevalence of patients with cancers diagnosed during childhood required the development of an ad hoc method, called CHILDPREV, deriving from the completeness index approach, generally applied to estimate complete prevalence from cancer registry data. Aim of this chapter is to provide a preliminary estimate of the number of people living after a previous cancer diagnosis in childhood applying for the first time the CHILDPREV method to a subset of Italian cancer registries. This chapter describes in brief strengths and weaknesses of the method.