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Children who receive cancer diagnoses often require radiation as part of multimodal therapy. However, long-term childhood cancer survivors who undergo radiation therapy are at risk for a number of medical conditions, including second malignancies, heart disease, and developmental problems. For example, young women who received ≥40 Gy chest irradiation for Hodgkin lymphoma by age 25 were estimated to have cumulative risk for breast cancer as high as 29% by age 55 (J Natl Cancer Inst 2005; 97:1428). In addition, other studies have identified an inverse relation between age of exposure to chest irradiation and subsequent risk for breast cancer (J Clin Oncol 2003; 21:4386).
To examine the association between irradiation for childhood cancer and …