According to a new report due to appear in the July issue of the journal Cancer, adult survivors of childhood cancer are twice as likely to be jobless as those who don't have that health history.
With certain cancers -- those of the brain and central nervous system -- the gap widens even further: those survivors were five times more likely than their counterparts to be unemployed. However, survivors of blood or bone cancers do not experience the same discrimination.
The news is worst for U.S. survivors. The researchers looked at 40 studies, including 24 controlled studies that looked at cancer survivors and compared them with healthy control subjects. When they looked by country, they found that U.S. survivors were three times more likely than the control groups to be unemployed, but there was no difference in joblessness between the patient and control groups in Europe.
"We do not know for sure what the best explanation is [for the country differences]," said study author Angela de Boer, a researcher at the Coronel Institute for Occupational Health of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. "It could be that in the U.S., the viewpoint of the society and employers regarding long-term survivors of cancer is different compared to that in Europe. Another possibility could be that the health insurance system in Europe is different to that in the U.S. In Europe, health insurances are generally not linked to employment in the way they are in the U.S."
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