With his poster on “Spatial clustering of childhood leukaemia: A nation-wide study“, Garyfallos Konstantinoudis won the prize for the best poster. Garyfallos’ project examines if childhood leukaemia cases form clusters in space in Switzerland. Although the study provides evidence for an individual cluster in a small rural area in Switzerland, after adjusting for multiple tests, this cluster was not found to be something extra-ordinary. Thus, this project highlights the need to account for multiple tests before such clusters are publicized. The study was funded by the Swiss Cancer Research and Swiss National Science Foundation.
Annette Weiss won the prize for the best presentation with her talk on “When cure causes harm – hearing loss after childhood cancer”. Using data from the Swiss Childhood Cancer Survivors Study, Annette`s project assessed if changes in current cancer treatment regimens affected the incidence of hearing loss in long term survivors of childhood cancer in Switzerland over the past decades. The study showed that the incidence of hearing loss has stabilized and survivors seemed to benefit from new treatment regimens with less ototoxic radiation and more carefully dosed platinum chemotherapy (Weiss et. al., Pediatric Blood & Cancer, 2016). The Swiss Cancer League and the European Union funded this project.
