December 10, 2025
Young adulthood is an exciting but often turbulent time, one of gaining independence while learning to navigate the world and make important decisions. Imagine how much more difficult this stage of life might be for someone who survived childhood cancer and now is faced with managing their follow-up care as an adult.
That transition may get easier for childhood cancer survivors who are moving to adult care at The University of Kansas Cancer Center, thanks to a $750,000 grant from Braden’s Hope for Childhood Cancer, a Kansas City-based nonprofit organization founded to accelerate the fight against childhood cancer. The award, announced today, will fund a new Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Transitions Program at KU Cancer Center.
For these adolescents and young adults, suddenly switching from a children’s hospital to a health system for adults can be difficult.
“Oftentimes, young adults at this point have really strong relationships with their providers in the pediatric health system,” said Carolyn Bates, PhD, a psychologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at KU Medical Center and a principal investigator on the grant. “These are the same folks who helped walk them, and their family, through their cancer treatment. And to transition to a place that is much less familiar, and with much less personalized support, can be a real challenge.”
And yet making that transition is important. Thanks to advances in treatment, 85% of children with cancer survive into adulthood today, a statistic up from 58% in the mid-1970s, according to the National Cancer Institute. This is good news, but surviving cancer does not signal the end of care for these patients. Many develop health issues later in life, including cardiac, neurocognitive, metabolic, endocrine and reproductive problems. Overall, they have a 73% chance of developing a chronic disease, and 42% experience a severe or life-threatening health problem within 30 years of their cancer diagnosis.
This all makes the transition to adult survivorship care critical to reduce the risk for these “late effects” of pediatric cancer. “Some treatments put you at risk for cardiac complications, so you have to have earlier cardiac monitoring. Some put you at risk for infertility, so you have to have infertility screening at 23 instead of 35,” said Kari Struemph, PhD, a psychologist and clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at KU Medical Center, also a principal investigator on the grant. “If patients don’t transition and have those appointments, they are at greater risk for relapse or complications.”
The program will build on the services provided by the Survivorship Transitions Clinic at KU Cancer Center, established in 2014 to facilitate referrals from Children’s Mercy, a pediatric health system in Kansas City. A 2024 analysis showed that 66% of adolescent and young adult survivors successfully transitioned to the adult survivorship clinic at KU, with the lowest transition rates among those who were underinsured, under 25 years of age or living outside of the Kansas City area.
The new program aims to fill that gap. It will provide support for young adult cancer survivors, primarily ages 18 to 24, who are coming from Children’s Mercy or another pediatric health system to KU Cancer Center. Before even transitioning to KU Cancer Center, each patient will meet with either Bates or Struemph to learn how they could use personal support. This could include help with practical things such as navigating their insurance, assistance with scheduling around their work or education program or setting up subspecialty appointments, Bates said.
Patients in the program will also receive two years of assistance from a dedicated nurse navigator trained specifically to help young cancer survivors manage their care in a complex medical system. The nurse navigator will serve as their point of contact, answer questions and help them with issues such as scheduling appointments at a specialty clinic.
In addition to facilitating the transition to adult survivorship care, the other main goal of the program is to provide better support for fertility care. Many childhood cancer survivors do not receive sufficient information about how their disease or treatment may have affected their ability to have children. In addition to teaching oncology-focused providers about fertility risks and options for cancer survivors, the program will provide survivors with a fertility consultation when they transition to adult care.
Joy Fulbright, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Mercy and co-investigator on the grant, will serve as medical director of the program. Bates will serve as research director, and Struemph as clinical director. Becky Lowry, MD, a professor of internal medicine at KU Medical Center who developed the Survivorship Transitions Clinic in 2014 in collaboration with Fulbright, will help support the integration of services within the clinic.
Bates noted that although the program is specific to cancer, the lessons learned from it could be applied more broadly to other types of patients in this age range. “Supporting young adults is critical to the success of our care, and we have a lot of young adults in our health system that may need something different than our older adults,” she said. “We are excited to build a model of supporting them.”
This article originally appeared on the University of Kansas Medical Center's website.