Introduction :
Cancer among infants younger than one year of age represents a unique problem with distinct epidemiological, clinical and genetic characteristics compared with cancer in older age groups.(1) Cancers occurring in infants differ substantially from those in older children in terms of anatomic site, histological features and behaviors.(2) The prognosis for infants is often worse than for older children, even if the pathologic diagnosis is the same(3). In addition, those under the age of 1 have been shown to have a higher mortality from childhood cancer.(4)
Infant cancer incidences and trends in the United States (U.S.) were reported in 1997(5) and 1998(6) covering the periods from 1973-1992 and 1979-1991 but these data did not include survival rates. To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive updated report that specifically focuses on cancer incidence trends and survival among infants in the U.S.(7-9) Because infants continue to be at a disproportionately higher risk of early cancer mortality, notwithstanding pediatric oncology treatment advances in the last two decades,(4, 10) it is critical to examine what happened in this cancer cohort in order to explore how survival rates can be improved.
Therefore, the aims of this study were to describe the cancer incidence, temporal trends, and survival among infants (<1 year old) over the 40-year period from 1975 to 2014 in the U.S. using SEER data to identify demographic and geographic variations.
Materials and Methods :