September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, a time to recognize the progress made in treating childhood cancers while acknowledging the work that remains.
Decades of research have changed what is possible for children with cancer. The five-year survival rate for pediatric cancers has risen from 63% in the mid-1970s to 87% for children diagnosed between 2015 and 2021. But those gains have not been shared equally across all pediatric cancers, and many children still face difficult treatments and long-term effects.
That progress depends on more than new drugs, procedures, or treatment technologies. It also depends on the teams that make those advances possible in real clinical environments.
A Regional Leader in Pediatric Cancer Care
Children’s Hospital Colorado is a major pediatric research and treatment center serving families throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Through its affiliation with the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Anschutz Medical Campus, Children’s brings clinical care and research together.
CAMP partners with Children’s in medical and health physics, supporting the specialized care and research taking place there. One example is Children’s specialized I-131 MIBG program for children with neuroblastoma and other cancers that can be treated with radiopharmaceuticals. Children’s is one of approximately 25 hospitals in the United States offering MIBG therapy to children and the only hospital in the region offering the treatment. The program includes a multidisciplinary team and a treatment environment specifically designed to manage radiation safely.
MIBG is one example of how advances in cancer treatment create new responsibilities for medical and health physicists. When radioactive materials are used therapeutically, the physics does not end when the treatment is prescribed. Someone has to understand how radiation behaves, how it is measured, where it needs to be contained, how workers and families can be protected, and what procedures are needed to meet regulatory requirements.
That work becomes especially important when the patient is a child.
A Different Kind of Safety Challenge
Health physics focuses on the safe use of radiation and radioactive materials, with the goal of protecting patients, workers, families, and the public from unnecessary exposure.
At Children’s, that can mean working directly with families whose child is receiving a treatment involving radioactive material. Health physicists help determine what safety precautions are appropriate and whether a child’s circumstances make outpatient care possible. They may discuss distance, contact with siblings, home arrangements, transportation, and other practical considerations that can affect how radiation safety recommendations work outside the hospital.
Those conversations can be more complicated in pediatric care than they might be for an adult patient.
“With adults, you can talk directly with the patient about the restrictions and determine whether they can follow them. With pediatric patients, you’re working with the parents, and the home situations are often much more complicated.” says Cheri Douglas, CAMP Health Physicist and Radiation Safety Officer at Children’s Hospital Colorado.
A child may share a bedroom with siblings. Parents may need to provide hands-on care. Younger children may not understand why they cannot sit next to their brother or sister or follow their normal routines. “It’s much more difficult to ensure that they have the appropriate distance,” Douglas says.
The underlying principle is simple: radiation can be an important part of a patient’s treatment, but unnecessary radiation exposure is something to prevent. One way Douglas explains that distinction to families is to compare radiation to a prescription medication. A medication may be helpful for the person it was prescribed for, but it can be harmful to someone who does not need it. Radiation used as part of a patient’s treatment follows the same basic principle: it serves a purpose for the patient, while everyone else should avoid unnecessary exposure.
The challenge is finding that balance without making families unnecessarily fearful. Health physicists have to provide enough information for families to understand the risks and follow the precautions while also helping them find ways to make those precautions work in everyday life.
“What we often run into is more education and working with the family to find solutions. Sometimes, that may mean we do more inpatient therapies with children than adults.” Douglas says.
Working With Families, Not Just Patients
The work extends beyond the patient and family, too. Health physicists are involved in radioactive materials licensing, policies and procedures, dose monitoring, contamination control, staff education, radioactive waste and storage, and the safe transportation of radioactive materials. At a research-focused pediatric hospital, those responsibilities can also change as new treatments and research protocols are introduced.
For Children’s, maintaining the hospital’s radioactive materials license and expanding the program when new tests, protocols, or research activities require it are part of the Radiation Safety Officer’s responsibilities. When radioactive materials move between facilities, questions about transportation, storage, monitoring, and safety become part of the work as well.
CAMP’s medical and health physics teams support these efforts alongside the hospital’s clinical and research teams. The work may not be visible to a family sitting in a treatment room, but it is part of what allows new therapies and research to move from an idea into clinical practice.
Building the Infrastructure for Innovation
Medical progress rarely arrives as a single event. A new treatment may require new procedures, new training, new safety measures, regulatory work, and new ways of thinking about how care is delivered.
That is particularly true when research introduces radioactive materials or other technologies into a clinical environment. As new programs and studies emerge, health physicists help evaluate what needs to change, from monitoring and procedures to staff education and the safe handling, storage, and transportation of radioactive materials.
“Every advancement in medicine requires advancement in physics, too. As medicine continues to advance, we have to continue advancing the safety, education and processes that support it,” Douglas says.
That relationship is easy to overlook. Medical advances are often described in terms of the treatment itself: a new therapy, a new technology, a new clinical trial. But each advancement also creates questions about how to use it safely, how to protect the people around it, and how to build it into everyday patient care.
Those questions require ongoing education, research, collaboration, and expertise.
Childhood Cancer Awareness: Making Room for Hope
This month is an opportunity to recognize how far pediatric cancer care has come while keeping sight of the children and families who still need better options. Research has improved survival for many childhood cancers, but progress continues to depend on collaboration across medicine, science, engineering, and physics.
For the teams supporting that work, the goal is ultimately practical: make it possible to use new treatments safely and effectively for the children who need them.
Sometimes progress means a new treatment option. Sometimes it means another day together. Sometimes it means a little more time, fewer complications, or an improvement in quality of life.
The science behind that progress may not be what families see first. But it is part of the work that makes progress possible.
Learn more about pediatric cancer research and progress through the American Association for Cancer Research’s Childhood Cancer Awareness Month resources.
