Purpose: Palliative care prevents or relieves the symptoms caused by life-threatening medical conditions. Previous surveys have shown both underuse and lack of availability of these services for children with cancer throughout North America. We sought to investigate the current practices and resources surrounding palliative and end-of-life care among participating institutions of the Children's Oncology Group (COG). Methods: A survey regarding practices and resources was developed by the COG palliative care subcommittee and was sent to all 232 institutions to complete for the calendar year 2005. Results: The survey was completed by 81% of the institutions. Per institution, there were a mean of 64.6 newly diagnosed patients and 17.7 patients experiencing relapse. A palliative care team was available in 58% of institutions, a pain service in 90%, a hospice in 60%, a psychosocial support team in 80%, and a bereavement program in 59%. Complementary and alternative medicine was available in 39% of institutions and in 95% of the COG institution's community. Most services, even when available, were not well used by patients. Conclusion: Despite the well-established benefit of pediatric palliative care, it is only offered in 58% of COG institutions caring for children with cancer. In an era where the benefit of palliative care has been clearly established, this number should approach 100%. Efforts should be directed toward understanding barriers to provision of such services, so that they are available and well used at all childhood cancer centers.

Purpose: CNS relapse of pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an infrequent occurrence. This review examines the risk factors and therapy used for patients with an isolated CNS relapse. Patients and Methods: Records of 886 patients with de novo AML were reviewed, and patients who entered remission at the end of one course of therapy and developed an isolated CNS relapse as their first event were analyzed (n = 690). Results: Thirty-three patients developed an isolated CNS relapse. Factors at diagnosis significantly associated with an isolated CNS relapse, compared with no CNS relapse, included age 0 to 2 years (70% v 27%, respectively; P < .001), enlarged liver (79% v 39%, respectively; P < .001) or spleen (79% v 39%, respectively; P < .001) at diagnosis, CNS disease at diagnosis (33% v 9%, respectively; P < .001), median WBC count (79.2 v 19.3 × 10³ μL, respectively; P < .001), French-American-British M5 morphology (45% v 15%, respectively; P < .001), and chromosome 11 abnormalities (44% v 18%, respectively; P = .022). Treatment of the isolated CNS relapse varied from local therapy with intrathecal chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy to systemic therapy with chemotherapy with or without bone marrow transplantation. Survival rate in the patients treated with local therapy was only 31.5% compared with 21.4% in patients treated with systemic therapy. The 8-year overall survival for patients after an isolated CNS relapse was similar to patients after a bone marrow relapse (26% ± 16% v 21% ± 5%, respectively). Conclusion: Significant predictors for isolated CNS relapse were identified. This study demonstrated that there may be no benefit to systemic therapy versus CNS-directed therapy in outcome. The data support CNS-directed therapy to treat isolated CNS relapse.