The findings may impact future care and prevention measures for nearly half a million Americans who fit into this category.
New Study: This Group Has Increased Risk of Kidney Disease and High Blood Pressure
Published on Jun. 22, 2025
Though we know cancer affects millions of Americans every year—and countless other lives as part of its devastating ripple effect—there’s another segment of the population who are, unfortunately, also directly impacted: children.
Approximately 15,780 children are diagnosed with cancer every year in the U.S., according to the American Childhood Cancer Organization. In particular, leukemia rates in children have reportedly been on the rise in recent decades.
Thankfully, more than 495,000 people in the U.S. are considered childhood and adolescent cancer survivors, according to the most recently available data from the National Cancer Institute. But after the joy of beating cancer, sometimes there’s the need for close monitoring for future health concerns.
A new study, published in the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA Network Open, set out to look into the potential correlation between chronic kidney disease and hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, and childhood cancer survivors.
The research was an important endeavor because “post-cancer therapy kidney outcomes” are common occurrences in childhood cancer survivors, especially since certain cancer treatments, such as radiation or certain chemotherapies, can be hard on the kidneys.
A large team of researchers based primarily in Ontario, Canada, also stated that “more than 99% of childhood cancer survivors have chronic health problems by age 50 years,” further intensifying the need for such research.
Their study, which spanned a total 27 years, monitored 10,182 children in Ontario who had received cancer treatments between April 1993 and March 2020. Data from those patients was compared with that from 40,728 children “who had been hospitalized” and 35,307 from an overall childhood population, presumably of relatively “healthy” children.
In the end, it was determined that the risk of developing either chronic kidney disease or hypertension was twice as high for childhood cancer survivors when compared to the group who had been hospitalized—and four times as likely when compared to the general population cohort.
Because both health issues can increase risk of cardiovascular disease or death—and because some patients were diagnosed with hypertension or chronic kidney disease as soon as one year after finishing their cancer treatments—the study’s results suggest childhood cancer survivors “require monitoring for blood pressure and kidney health soon after cancer treatment is complete and ongoing into adulthood.”
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