Poor academic performance in offspring of survivors with childhood or adolescent central nervous system tumor in Sweden

The number of children who were born after their parents were diagnosed with central nervous system (CNS) tumor is increasing, but it remains largely unknown regarding the academic performance of these children. We aimed to investigate whether children of survivors with childhood or adolescent CNS tumor were associated with poor academic performance. Children of survivors of CNS tumor were identified by combining the nationwide Swedish Cancer Register and the Multi-Generation Register, and those who have completed compulsory education in Sweden between 1989 and 2015 were included in our study. “Poor academic performance” was defined as a z-score of the academic performance below the 10th percentile. Conditional logistic regression and quantile regression were used to examine the association. A total of 655 children were born after their parental diagnosis of CNS tumor and they had 1.39 times higher risk of achieving poor academic performance as compared to the matched comparisons (95% CI = 1.10-1.76). The poor academic performance was even more pronounced in boys, among those with a paternal diagnosis of CNS tumor and those with a parental ependymoma. The observed association differed depending on preterm birth. In addition, the strength of the association declined with the increased quantiles of academic performance z-score. Our data suggest that parental CNS tumor affects the subsequent academic achievements among children born after the parental tumor.