{"id":799641,"date":"2026-10-12T00:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T00:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/799641\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T00:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T00:22:08","slug":"maesteg-teen-whose-cancer-returned-after-remission-has-clinical-trial-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/799641\/","title":{"rendered":"Maesteg teen whose cancer returned after remission has clinical trial hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

A teenage boy with lymphoma says he coped with the return of his cancer by detaching himself from his illness, following advice from father who also faced the disease.<\/p>\n

Ethan Griffiths, 14, was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, external<\/a> – a type of fast-growing non-Hodgkin lymphoma (nHL) – in January, undergoing chemotherapy and being declared cancer-free in May, before having an “aggressive” relapse<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The sport and gaming-mad teen, who underwent a new treatment being trialled in Bristol, came home to Maesteg cancer-free again in September. <\/p>\n

“Through it all I tried to stay as positive as I could,” said Ethan, adding it was his dad Lloyd, also a cancer survivor, who was often “losing his head”. <\/p>\n

News of the young rugby player’s relapse came just two weeks after getting home from the hospital. <\/p>\n

“It was much more heartbreaking because I was getting back into everything,” he said. <\/p>\n

“I went to school for half a day, and I was going to the gym quite regularly and getting back into fitness.<\/p>\n

“Then obviously to hear that news was really horrendous.”<\/p>\n

His family faced “immeasurable stress” as Ethan joined a clinical trial at Bristol Royal Hospital Children for patients with B-cell nHL who had not responded to treatment or had relapsed.<\/p>\n

The UK-wide trial involving two new drugs, external<\/a> offered just a 50% chance of success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenage boy with lymphoma says he coped with the return of his cancer by detaching himself from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-799641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}