SALiCCS: Socioeconomic Consequences in Adult Life after Childhood Cancer in Scandinavia – a three Nordic country-wide population based study

Over the past five decades, substantial advances in tumour biology and treatment have led to considerable improvement in childhood cancer survival, with five-year survival now exceeding 80%. As a result, the number of childhood cancer survivors increases continuously. The challenge of today is to reduce the treatment related complications, while maintaining high survival. Whereas a large number of studies investigated somatic late effects in survivors, little is known about the socioeconomic and psychosocial impact of childhood cancer in long-term survivors.

The overall aim of this Nordic collaborative project is to investigate socioeconomic consequences in long-term survivors after childhood cancer within a large cross-national population-based setting, taking also the somatic and psychiatric disease burden of the survivors into consideration. Socioeconomic circumstances such as education, employment, need of social security benefits, partnership and founding a family are areas that will be investigated.

The study population is based on the already established cohorts within the Adult Life after Childhood Cancer in Scandinavia (ALiCCS) study, that was created to study somatic late effects of childhood cancer. The updated cohort that forms SALiCCS contains follow-up information of approximately 24,000 5-year cancer survivors from Denmark, Sweden and Finland, five times as many population comparisons and siblings to the cancer survivors. Data-linkage is performed between the national cancer registries, population registries, hospital registries, and registers including socioeconomic information.

The project is lead from the Danish Cancer Society Research Center, by principal investigator Jeanette Falck Winther.

Official webpage of SALiCCS