Childhood cancer mythbusters
Things people will say to you, and things you will read at 2 a.m., checked against the research. Each one gets a plain verdict and the studies behind it.
- Verdict: False
“90% of marriages end in divorce when a child has cancer”
I went looking for the study behind the 90 percent figure and could not find one. What I found were seven studies that actually measured it, three of them following every family in a country through national records. None comes close to the saying. Here they are, one at a time, with what each one can and cannot tell a family like ours.
- Verdict: Partly true
“Nobody knows where childhood cancer comes from”
Partly true. For most children with leukemia, nobody can say why it happened, and that is the honest answer. But for the common form of childhood B-ALL, researchers have worked out a surprising amount about how it starts: in many kids the first step happens before birth, most who take that step never get sick, and a second push in early childhood is needed. Here is that story in plain terms, then the everyday things people ask about.