A risk factor is anything that affects your chance of getting a disease such as cancer.

Lifestyle-related risk factors are important in many cancers in adults. Examples of lifestyle-related risks include obesity, unhealthy diets, not getting enough exercise, smoking, and drinking too much alcohol. But unlike many adult cancers, lifestyle-related risk factors do not seem to play a large role in childhood cancers, including neuroblastomas.

Heredity

In rare cases (about 1% to 2% of all neuroblastomas), children may inherit an increased risk of developing neuroblastoma. But the vast majority of neuroblastomas do not seem to be inherited.

Children with the familial form of neuroblastoma (those with an inherited tendency to develop this cancer) usually come from families with one or more affected members who had neuroblastoma as infants. The average age at diagnosis of familial cases is earlier than the age for sporadic (not inherited) cases.

Children with familial neuroblastoma may develop 2 or more of these cancers in different organs (for example, in both adrenal glands or in more than one sympathetic ganglion). It is important to distinguish neuroblastomas developing in several organs from neuroblastomas that have started in one organ and then spread to others (metastatic neuroblastomas). When tumors develop in several places at once it suggests a familial form. Metastases can occur with either the familial or sporadic forms.

Last Medical Review: 11/23/2009
Last Revised: 11/23/2009