Karim-Kos group

We focus on analysing childhood cancer statistics. Looking at these statistics, we aim to expand our knowledge about the incidence of childhood cancer, its spread in the population, possible causes and prognosis. Together, these are known as cancer surveillance. Secondly, we focus on unraveling the causes behind differences in outcomes between children and young adults diagnosed with the same cancer type to improve quality of care and outcomes in both patient groups, and to stimulate collaborations between pediatric and young adult cancer care units.

Childhood cancer surveillance

Cancer surveillance provides interesting information for and can be used in the development and evaluation of new interventions in two domains: a) the public health domain (population-level) focusing on primary and secondary prevention, and b) the clinical domain (patient-level) focusing on quality of care, prognosis and quality of life. Progress made in one or both domains can be assessed by standard surveillance measures: incidence, stage at diagnosis, survival and mortality. These measures are comparable on an international level and are available for the Netherlands since the 1990s.

In pediatric oncology, the largest intervention in the Netherlands has been concentration of care in one single center as of 2018, namely the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology, with the ambition to improve the outcome of childhood cancer. It is important to investigate the effect of this centralisation on quality of care and ‘cure’ in the future. Therefore, information on the prior situation is fundamental. Evaluation of pediatric cancer care, focusing on both the past and the future, is one of the main goals of our research group. Read more.

Outcome disparities between children and young adults with cancer

For several cancer types, adolescents and young adults (AYAs, 18-39 years) have a worse prognosis compared to pediatric patients (0-17 years). The exact reasons for the inferior outcomes of AYAs with cancer are, however, still not clear. Notably, in the context of the Netherlands, possible causes have hardly been studied at all. The focus of our research group is to determine factors contributing to the outcome disparities between AYAs and children diagnosed with cancer. Read more.

Etiology 

TransExpo is an international project that studies whether living near a transformer that converts high voltage from the electricity network into 230 Volt could lead to an increase in childhood leukemia. In the Netherlands, the research was carried out by the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences at Utrecht University in collaboration with the Prinses Máxima Center for pediatric oncology. 
 
The evidence for an elevated risk of childhood leukemia in children living near transformers was weak. However, due to the small number of included patients, it was not possible to make any strong conclusions. Results have been published in Environmental Research (2024). Pubmed PMID: 38346482