Abstract

Objective: To assess the prevalence and incidence rate of Leukemia, Retinoblastoma, Wilms tumour, Lymphoma, Malignant neoplasm of connective and soft tissue and Neuroblastoma at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) and to determine the age at diagnosis, gender and mortality rate of above cancer types.

Design: It was a retrospective descriptive study conducted at KNH using health records from childhood cancer registry of children aged 0 - 12 years who were diagnosed or referred to Kenyatta National Hospital with cancer from the period January 2009 to December 2019. Based on patient’s inpatient number, we excluded from our analyses all re-hospitalizations of the same patients avoiding duplications.

Results: The prevalence of Leukemia from our study was 30.6% (n-650), retinoblastoma 23.3% (n-495), Wilms tumour 16.9% (n-359), Lymphoma 16% (n-339), Malignant neoplasm of connective and soft tissue 9.1% (n-193) and Neuroblastoma at 4.1% (n-87). Leukemia had the highest incidence rate of 70.6 per million while Neuroblastoma had the lowest at 9.4 per million children between age 0 - 12 years. All these cancer types occurred more common between age 0 - 4 years at 64% (n-1359). Males were mostly affected than females. Retinoblastoma had the lowest mortality rate at 6.9% while leukemia and Neuroblastoma had the highest mortality rate, both at 47.1%.

Conclusion: Leukaemia, Retinoblastoma, Wilms tumour and Lymphoma are the most prevalent type of cancers at KNH, in that order. With this data, we hope that it will aid policy decisions with an aim of improving patient care quality.

Keywords: Cancer Registry; Childhood Tumours; Incidence; Mortality Rate; Prevalence

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Citation

Citation: Mutua Irene and Mwika Peter. “Incidence of Childhood Cancers at a Tertiary Hospital in Kenya: 2009 - 2019". Acta Scientific Paediatrics 3.8 (2020): 19-24.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Mutua Irene and Mwika Peter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.