Survival
Remoteness was identified as a significant survival factor for the
entire cohort of patients with leukaemia (p=0.004, Fig. 1B). Five-year
overall survival was 91.7% (95% CI = 87.9%-94.3%) for children with
ALL (Table 3), ranging from 92.2% for non-Aboriginal children to 82.4%
for Aboriginal children (p=0.07). The 5-year overall survival was 69.8%
(95% CI = 56.7-79.5%) for children with AML (Table 3). Unlike ALL,
there was no trend for a difference in AML survival according to
ethnicity (p=0.88). Analysis according to leukaemia type revealed a
trend for inferior survival for children from remote and very remote
localities for both ALL (p=0.08) and AML (p=0.08) (Table 3). Since a
larger population of Aboriginal patients come from remote areas, there
is an overlap between remoteness and Aboriginal ethnicity. No
significant differences in survival were found by either state/territory
or SES for ALL or AML (Table 3).