Table 4.
Similarities among neuroblastoma and other pediatric solid tumors. A cancer is marked pediatric if it has high incidence among all children with cancer, or has high pediatric incidence relative to adult. Small round blue cell tumors are cancers with a similar histologic appearance (highly nucleated, mesenchymal) that are often difficult to distinguish, especially in pediatric patients. If a subset of patients present with mutations or amplifications, a cancer is marked as being MYCN or ALK modified. While spontaneous regression is a rare event in all cancers, some experience slightly higher rates of treatment-independent full or partial regression of tumors and are included in the table as experiencing “spontaneous regression.” (*) Spontaneous regression cases of retinoblastomas may actually be benign retinomas, and therefore misclassified [96,97,140,141,142,143,144,145,146,147,148,149,150,151,152,153,154].
| Cancer Type | Pediatric | Small Round Blue Cell Tumors | MYCN | ALK | Spontaneous Regression |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neuroblastoma | Yes | + | + | + | + |
| Retinoblastoma | Yes | + | + | + | |
| Medulloblastoma | Yes | + | + | ||
| Glioblastoma | Yes | + | + | ||
| Optic pathway glioma | Yes | + | |||
| Rhabdomyosarcoma | Yes | + | + | + | |
| Ewing sarcoma | Yes | + | + | ||
| Melanoma | Rare | + | + | ||
| Small cell lung cancer | Rare | + | + | ||
| Non-small cell lung cancer | Rare | + | + | ||
| Wilms’ tumor | Yes | + | + | ||
| Renal cell carcinoma | Yes | + | + |
+ indicates that the corresponding cancer does exhibit the indicated trait.