His family watched him endure seven surgeries following seven relapses, rounds of debilitating chemotherapy and countless hospital stays. And at the end of his nearly six-year ordeal, they still lost Bear.
Barrett “Bear” Krupa died in 1993 when he was 8 years old from Wilms’ tumor, a pediatric kidney cancer. His battle inspired the creation of Bear Necessities, the primary beneficiary of Dance Marathon 2008. The nonprofit organization received more than $593,000 from Dance Marathon last month to fund research grants.
According to Bear Necessities representatives, more than 12,000 children will be diagnosed with some form of cancer this year, including 400 in the Chicago area. But researchers still aren’t sure of the cause of the disease and why it mostly affects children.
.”We need to take a look at the future of our children and the diseases that are here,” said Bear Necessities President Kathleen Casey, who founded the organization in memory of her son, Bear
Wilms’ tumor appears in one out of 10,000 children, mostly in those younger than five, said Dr. Elizabeth Mullen, instructor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
“All too often we think there has to be a cause and an effect,” said Dr. Clarke Anderson, a pediatric oncologist at City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center in Duarte, Calif. “A lot of time in children, there simply is no identifiable cause.”
Even though most pediatric cancers don’t have prevention programs like breast cancer screenings, Wilms’ tumor can sometimes be diagnosed at birth, Anderson said. Certain syndromes like a growth disorder that causes half a child’s body to grow slightly larger than the other are an early indicator of the cancer.
Patients with Wilms’ tumor have a survival rate of about 80 to 90 percent, but the chances of surviving the cancer in its advanced stages are significantly lower, Mullen added.
“If you’re in a room with 10 children with Wilms’ tumor, you still don’t want to think about losing one of them,” she said.
Most cases of pediatric kidney cancer can be treated with surgery followed by chemotherapy, and children generally tolerate the toxic treatment well, Mullen said.
“It’s true in general,” she said. “Children are actually very good, probably because they have extremely healthy hearts, healthy lungs, healthy organs.”
Recent research has concentrated on less invasive and less toxic treatments for children, said Lisa Orlando, communications and marketing director of the Pediatric Cancer Foundation.
The Florida-based nonprofit also recently launched The Sunshine Project, which aims to develop new treatments for Wilms’ tumor and similar types of cancers after chemotherapy and radiation are no longer effective.
“What we’re focusing on right now is solid tumors, because a lot of these forms of tumors have not seen new forms of treatment in 20 years,” Orlando said. The project explores “areas that have been virtually untouched,” as opposed to researching leukemia and lymphoma, the most common types of cancer, she said.
“I don’t think that it’s going to be one drug that cures all,” Orlando said. “Right now it’s about finding particular drugs that are effective on particular types of cancer. It’s going to take a lot of doctors and it’s going to take a lot of funding.”
