Incidentally, primary adrenal tumors are much more common in the pediatric population. Neuroblastoma, a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system, is the most common extracranial solid tumor of early childhood. Kids usually present with a large primary tumor in the abdomen, arising from the adrenal gland. It's a fascinating type of cancer from a research standpoint - infants can have widely disseminated disease, with mets to multiple distant sites including bones and bone marrow, but it usually resolves spontaneously
without chemotherapy. In children who are older than 2 years or so at diagnosis, however, especially those whose tumor has "unfavorable" genetic and microscopic features, effective treatment options are few and survival rates are poor, with most kids succumbing to widespread refractory disease within 5 years of diagnosis. It is a brutal disease and the treatment, such as it is, includes high dose chemotherapy, radiation, and stem cell transplant. Kids who do survive frequently suffer from significant hearing loss, sterility, short stature, heart disease, learning disabilities, and secondary cancers, all related to the utterly barbaric standard treatment necessary to save their lives. Imagine the pain from a cancer arising from your nerves, and then imagine that you're 5 years old and don't understand why the doctors who are trying to help you are actually just making you feel worse.
This is your routine reminder that fewer than four cents of every dollar designated for cancer research in the United States is used to benefit pediatric patients, and most cancer treatments for children are basically unchanged from the ones used in the 1970s.