Dramatic Increase in Hospital Admissions for Children with Cancer
The number of hospital admissions for patients age 18 and under with cancer increased by more than 80 percent between 2000 and 2005—from roughly 54,000 to nearly 100,000 admissions—according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The increase was driven partly by a dramatic improvement in the survival rate of children with cancer. While children with cancer are increasingly treated in outpatient settings, some types of care still require hospitalization.
AHRQ also found in 2005 that:
• Children with leukemia and brain cancer were most likely to be hospitalized with 10,100 and 6,100 stays respectively.
• Children also were hospitalized with bone and connective tissue cancer (3,200 stays), Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (1,700 stays), cancer of the kidney (1,400 stays), and Hodgkin’s disease (900 stays). An additional 53,000 stays were for children requiring maintenance chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer.
• Children ages 1 to 4 accounted for more than 26 percent of the hospital stays for pediatric cancer, followed by children ages 10 to 14 (25 percent), 5 to 9 (22 percent) and 15 to 17 (19 percent). Infants less than a year old accounted for 8 percent of the stays.
• The percentage of children treated for cancer who died while hospitalized was less than 1 percent (0.9 percent).
• Hospital costs for children with cancer totaled $1.7 billion.
This AHRQ News & Numbers summary is based on Pediatric Hospital Stays for Cancer, 2005 (http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb37.pdf). The report uses statistics from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a database of hospital inpatient stays that is nationally representative of inpatient stays in all short-term, non-Federal hospitals. The data are drawn from hospitals that comprise 90 percent of all discharges in the United States and include all patients, regardless of insurance type, as well as the uninsured.
Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
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