• Posted September 3, 2024

Childhood Brain Tumor Survivors Can Lag in School -- Interventions Can Help

Brain tumors in young children are rare, but those who survive them can lag in school for years afterwards, new research shows.

For those families that can afford it, intervening when kids are still in the preschool years might help them perform better academically later on, researchers said.

“We now know that we don't need to wait until patients are struggling with math and reading; we can intervene earlier,” said study senior author Heather Conklin.

“We showed that the variability we're seeing early on predicts longer-term academic skills, which highly suggests earlier interventions will be beneficial and make a real difference," said Conklin, chief of neuropsychology at  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

The new research focused on an understudied group: Children who had been treated and survived a brain tumor that occurred in infancy or before the age of 3.

Conklin and her colleagues followed the academic progress of 70 of these children every six months over the course of five years.

"We found an increasing gap between these young patients treated for brain tumors and their typically developing peers because their academic readiness skills were not developing as fast,” she noted in a St. Jude news release. "They were gradually falling behind their same-age peers in academic fundamentals, such as learning their letters, numbers and colors.”

The lag in development and academic skills was durable.

“Early academic readiness was predictive of long-term reading and math outcomes,” Conklin said. “The effect isn’t temporary. These children don’t just catch up naturally.”

A certain segment of children did tend to close the gap over time, however: Those from better-off families.

“The only clinical or demographic factor we found that predicted academic readiness was socioeconomic status,” Conklin said. “Being from a family of higher socioeconomic status had a protective effect on children’s academic readiness.” 

That's probably because parents have the money and time to invest in interventions that help toddlers catch up.

Finding ways to help the families of all childhood survivors of brain cancer access these resources is important, the researchers said, because cancer treatment keeps youngsters from developing as they naturally would.

“We know that being away from their home environment, caregivers, daycare, play dates, parks and early intervention services during these critical developmental years is probably having a negative impact on very young patients,” Conklin explained.

“Our results suggest that families can make play meaningful, and by making little changes in how they interact with their child, with the support of their medical team and receiving appropriate resources, they may be able to make a difference in their child’s cognitive and academic outcomes," she said.

The study was funded by St Jude and the National Cancer Institute, and published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

More information

Find out more about the treatment of pediatric brain tumors at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

SOURCE: St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, news release, Aug. 20, 2024