Our approach

At MD Anderson's Children's Cancer Hospital, we know your child's health and well being are your number one concern. Our renowned experts customize your child's care for lymphoma utilizing the most advanced treatments and techniques with the least impact on your child's growing body.

As part of one of the world's most active cancer centers, Children's Cancer Hospital has remarkable experience and skill in these types of cancer. This can make a difference in your child's outcome.

Customized care

A team of specially trained physicians follows your child throughout treatment, all the way to survivorship. They communicate closely with each other, and with you, to ensure comprehensive, personalized care. They are supported by full complement of health care professionals dedicated to your child's treatment, including nurses, physician assistants, therapists and others.

Children's Cancer Hospital offers clinical trials for innovative new treatments for lymphoma. Behind the scenes we are working on groundbreaking basic science research to change the future of pediatric cancer.

Treating the whole child

Children's Cancer Hospital is designed just for children, with a full range of services and amenities that help make the child and family's experience as comfortable as possible. We go beyond medical care to deliver a comprehensive experience that treats the whole child.

And at Children's Cancer Hospital, your child benefits from the resources and expertise of one of the nation's top cancer centers.

Our childhood lymphoma treatment

The lymph system carries fluids throughout the body, which allows lymphoma to spread easily. Chemotherapy can also travel throughout the body easily. That makes it the most common treatment for lymphoma. Chemotherapy can be administered in four ways:

• Orally (taking pills by mouth)
• Intravenously (injected into the vein)
• Intrathecal (injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid)
• Subcutaneously (beneath the skin)

Radiation therapy (also called radiotherapy) uses high-energy beams to destroy cancer cells. It is rarely used to threat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and used only some of the time to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma.

It is sometimes used in conjunction with chemotherapy to treat large areas, or to minimize discomfort caused by cancerous lymph nodes that are affecting nearby organs or structures. In can also be used to treat tumors that have formed in the central nervous system.

Surgery is also an option for some lymphomas. It can be used when tumors are causing severe and immediate problems, like intestinal blocks, severe pain from compressed nerves and organs, or breathing troubles. In rare cases, it can be used as a form of curative therapy.