Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Awareness Week
March 31 - April 4, 2025
The first week of April is Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Awareness Week. This annual awareness week is an opportunity to shine a light on the unique challenges that teen and young adult cancer patients and survivors face. Learn about AYA cancers directly from the source by clicking on a thumbnail image below to meet some of our college scholarship recipients who were diagnosed as teenagers.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about 89,000 young people (ages 15 to 39) are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States—accounting for about five percent of cancer diagnoses in the United States.
The most common cancer types among 15-19 year olds are thyroid cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma, brain and central nervous system tumors, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. For young adults in their twenties, the most common cancer types are thyroid cancer, testicular cancer, melanoma, and Hodgkin lymphoma.
In adolescents, the incidence rate continues to rise about one percent every year. The 2022 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer reports that while survival rates continue to improve, progress among adolescents has lagged behind that in children “partly because of differences in tumor biology, clinical trial enrollment, treatment protocols, and tolerance and compliance with treatment.”
In our 2024 Transitions in Care statement, we explore - and propose recommended solutions to - the challenges around transitioning from pediatric to adult care and also oncology care to non-oncology care, issues that have a big impact on the AYA cancer population. “I would love to access survivorship care but know nothing about it and don’t know where I’d find it,” a lymphoma survivor diagnosed at 18 told us in our annual survey of survivors. “When I aged out of my oncologist they told me to just follow up with my primary care provider.”
We will be sharing AYA awareness posts on social media all week long. Be sure to follow us on our social channels - linked below - and share with your own network to help increase awareness for this often-overlooked group of young people.
