A risk factor is anything that affects the chance of having a disease such as cancer. Different cancers have different risk factors. For example, smoking is a risk factor for several types of cancer in adults.
Lifestyle-related risk factors such as diet, body weight, physical activity, and tobacco use play a major role in many adult cancers. But these factors usually take many years to influence cancer risk, and they are not thought to play much of a role in childhood cancers, including rhabdomyosarcomas.
No environmental factors (such as exposures during the mother's pregnancy or in early childhood) are known to increase the chance of getting rhabdomyosarcoma.
Age and gender
Rhabdomyosarcomas are most common in children under the age of 10, but they can also occur in teens and adults. They are slightly more common in boys than in girls.
Inherited conditions
Some people inherit a tendency to develop certain types of cancer. The DNA we inherit from our parents may have certain changes that account for this tendency to develop cancer. Some rare inherited conditions increase the risk of rhabdomyosarcoma (and usually some other tumors as well).
- Members of families with Li-Fraumeni syndrome are more likely to develop sarcomas, breast cancer, leukemia, and some other cancers.
- Children with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome have a high risk of developing Wilms tumor, a type of kidney cancer, but they may also develop rhabdomyosarcoma.
- Neurofibromatosis, also known as von Recklinghausen disease, usually causes multiple nerve tumors, but it also increases the risk of rhabdomyosarcoma.
- Costello syndrome is a very rare congenital abnormality. Children with this syndrome have high birth weights but then fail to grow well and are short. They also tend to have a large head. They are prone to develop rhabdomyosarcomas as well as other tumors.
These conditions are rare and account for only a small fraction of rhabdomyosarcoma cases. But they suggest that the key to understanding rhabdomyosarcoma will come from studying genes and how they work in very early life to control cell growth and development.
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