The Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS)

The Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) was created to take advantage of:

1. The opportunity to gain new knowledge about the long-term effects of cancer and therapy, knowledge that can be used to help design treatment protocols and intervention strategies that will increase survival and minimize harmful health effects, and
2. The obligation to educate survivors about the potential impacts of cancer diagnosis and treatment on their health, and to provide follow-up care, for example, by creating and implementing programs for the prevention and early detection of late effects.

The Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, or CCSS, is a component of the Long Term Follow Up Study, which began in 1994 and is a collaborative, multi-institutional study funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute (U24 CA55727) of the National Institutes of Health. The CCSS is composed of individuals who survived five or more years after diagnosis of cancer, leukemia, tumor, or similar illness diagnosed during childhood or adolescence.

The CCSS, which includes all participants in the Long Term Follow Up Study with a confirmed diagnosis of cancer, is a retrospectively ascertained cohort of 38,036 childhood cancer survivors diagnosed between 1970 and 1999. It also includes over 5,000 siblings of survivors who serve as the comparison group for the study.

The CCSS cohort has been assembled through the efforts of 31 participating centers in the United States and Canada. It is coordinated through St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Other core facilities include the Statistical Center, located at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle, WA); the Biopathology Center (Columbus, OH); the Biorepository and Molecular Center (Cincinnati, OH); and the Radiation Physics Center at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX).

To visit the full site for the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, go to http://ccss.stjude.org.