Despite greater focus on pediatric palliative and supportive oncology services in the United States, children with cancer may not be receiving high-quality end-of-life care. Many children with advanced cancer report incredible pain, fatigue, and nausea near the end of life, and over 60 percent of children with cancer die in the hospital, despite evidence that most families prefer to be at home. Given this degree of unrelieved suffering, "there is an urgent need to benchmark quality of [end-of-life] care for children with cancer and to engage in quality improvement initiatives," Emily Johnston, MD, MS, and colleagues write in a recent commentary published in Cancer.

Nearly one in four families of pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia enrolled in a clinical trial experienced food insecurity, and almost half of the families eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program did not receive benefits. In addition, receiving SNAP benefits was not sufficient to address food insecurity, according to results presented at the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved, held September 16-19, 2022.