LSU Health New Orleans awarded grant to provide early data on cancer in kids

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded LSU Health New Orleans School of Public Health's Louisiana Tumor Registry a $1.3 million grant over five years to more rapidly find and report cases of cancer in children and young adults. One of only eight state registries to successfully compete for this funding, the award will support efforts to increase the availability of this data for surveillance and research activities at the local, state and national level.

This continuation funding will enhance and build the existing infrastructure of the LSU Health New Orleans Louisiana Tumor Registry to capture this data more quickly and promote its use for research and cancer control programs. LSU Health New Orleans will enhance its cancer data on children and young adults by linkages with secondary data sets, providing a more robust research resource.

Key partners include the LSU Health New Orleans Pediatric Cancer Program at Children's Hospital where about 50% of new pediatric cancer cases are diagnosed and/or treated, major medical centers that treat pediatric cancers, St. Jude-affiliated clinics throughout Louisiana and out-of-state children's hospitals.

This data can serve as a valuable tool to better outcomes for young people who have cancer.

"The data obtained from this award provides a unique opportunity for research to better understand why survival of a particularly vulnerable subgroup of adolescents and young adults has not improved over the last two decades and to change that," concludes grant principal investigator Dr. Vivien Chen, LSU Health New Orleans Professor of Epidemiology. Dr. Chen led the Registry for many years and secured its designation as one of only 18 registries in the National Cancer Institute's SEER Program.

Provided by Louisiana State University