On Oct. 7, 2025, St. Jude announced that it hosts multiple freely accessible Medical Risk Calculators on the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) and the St. Jude Cloud websites. These tools are made for survivors and their physicians to tailor calculations to their specific details, empowering survivors to find and act on their individual risk for late effects of childhood cancer and its treatment.

“Our population of survivors is distinct,” said Greg Armstrong, MD, MSCE, Department of Epidemiology & Cancer Control chair, who also heads the CCSS. “They’ve received radiation and chemotherapy as children, which changes the game on everything. It changes their risk for heart disease, infertility, second cancers and more. That is why we need survivor-specific health risk calculators.”

Over a decade ago, CCSS put out its first medical risk calculators. These tools used the information that mattered most based on survivorship research, such as cancer treatment exposures and cancer type, to quantify the risk of a survivor experiencing a particular health outcome years later. Yutaka Yasui, PhD, Department of Epidemiology & Cancer Control, helped create this first iteration of risk calculators.

Though pediatric cancer once had a survival rate of 4%, that number has increased to over 80% in the United States, creating a large group of survivors. Those treated at St. Jude can participate in the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study (St. Jude LIFE). While the CCSS relies primarily on self-reported data, St. Jude LIFE measures objective clinical data from survivors over time. Yadav Sapkota, PhD, Department of Epidemiology & Cancer Control, combines data from both cohorts to create more accurate predictions of survivors’ risk for cardiac disease, which he published earlier this year in the Annals of Oncology.

Survivorship researchers across St. Jude are continuing to update and improve resources, including these calculators to ensure survivors and their physicians are working with the most accurate information possible when making medical decisions.