Thankfully, there are more cancer survivors today than in generations past, Dr. Kenneth Miller of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute emphasizes. But that means there are also a growing number of “co-survivors,’’ family members of cancer patients who have their own special needs. An article published last week in the journal Cancer counts perhaps the most vulnerable of them: children and adolescents whose parents survive cancer.
In the United States, about 1.58 million cancer survivors are living with 2.85 million children under 18, according to estimates from Kathryn Weaver of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. She and her colleagues analyzed a nationally representative survey conducted between 2000 and 2007, from which they also project that half a million children are living with parents in the early stages of cancer treatment and recovery.
Miller was not involved in the study, which is among the first to gauge the number of children who live with cancer survivors, but he directs the Adult Cancer Survivorship Program at Dana-Farber. And his wife, Joan Miller, is a two-time leukemia survivor, dating to when their three daughters were 15, 11, and 7.
Families seek the survivorship program’s services when they are trying to put their lives back together after weathering the acute phase of cancer, when diagnosis and treatment crowd out just about everything else.
“It’s just very basic issues of good parenting,’’ Miller said. “Many families have two active parents, so when one parent becomes very, very sick, the other parent will try to take care of them, the children, and themselves, which is profoundly difficult to do.’’
There is an adjustment that happens during and after the illness, he said. Children turn to other caregivers for support when they need to, so the family has to find a new balance when the parent with cancer tries to shift back to the way things were before. But that isn’t necessarily possible, or desirable, according to Miller.
“We call it the new normal,’’ he said.
The age of the child is crucial, but there can be positive aspects of the experience, he said. Some begin to do certain things for themselves. Or they can learn resilience as they see their parents get through a devastating time.
“We talk about post-traumatic stress disorder. What about post-traumatic growth syndrome?’’ Miller said. “The fact is people are resilient and they create and re-create great lives. I think we as health care givers could potentially help.’’ ELIZABETH COONEY
Need an ER? There's an app for that, thanks to MGH
Here’s an iPhone app you hope you never need.Researchers from the Emergency Medicine Network at Massachusetts General Hospital last week launched a free application for the iPhone that will tell you where the nearest hospital emergency rooms are in the United States.
“In talking with parents of children with asthma and allergies, it’s clear that travel is a particularly stressful time for these families. One of the reasons is the uncertainty about how/where to get emergency care should they need it,’’ Dr. Carlos A. Camargo, an MGH emergency department physician and director of EMNet, said in an e-mail interview.
“It occurred to our team that we could use our research database to create a simple application that would quickly connect families with the nearest ER — wherever they were in the United States.’’
E.C.
Bicycling, walking helps women to control weight
A new study reports that women were less likely to gain weight if they walked briskly or if they bicycled. The benefits of brisk walking — defined as at least 3 miles per hour — were already known. But bicycling has not been as well studied. Anne Lusk of the Harvard School of Public Health led a team that followed more than 18,000 healthy women in the Nurses Health Study II, who were ages 25 to 42, in 1989.After 16 years, the women gained an average of 20 pounds. Very few women said they were bicycling more than four hours a week in 1989, but women of normal weight who said they were bicycling that much in 2005 were 26 percent less likely than inactive women to have gained more than 5 percent of their body weight since 1989. For overweight women, the difference was even greater.
Lusk and her co-authors’ report appeared last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. E.C.
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