Reducing toxic waste: improving toxicity capture in childhood cancer

Although outcomes for many childhood cancers have substantially improved, potential cure comes with a cost in terms of both acute and long-term toxicities. Balancing disease control and toxicity is a challenge not only for health-care providers caring for individual patients, but for cooperative trial groups as well. In acute lymphoblastic leukaemia for example, the results of several recent trials suggest that we have reached the limit of tolerable toxicities associated with conventional chemotherapy.