A new study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has concluded that several factors such as sex, race and geographic area influence the cancer rates seen in U.S. kids. It appears that white boys in the Northwest are most likely to be diagnosed with cancer.

The study is the result of painstaking analysis of data representing 90 percent of the U.S. population, gathered from 39 National Program of Cancer Registries and five Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) databases.

The most common childhood malignancy is various forms of leukemias, which amount to 26 percent of all cancer cases. Brain tumors ranked second with almost 18 percent while the third place is taken by lymphomas which affected about 1415 percent of kids with cancer.

In the U.S. Nortwest there were 179 cases per million children, compared with 159 cases per million in the South. Boys accounted for 174 cases per million, compared with 157 cases per million in girls. White children had a cancer incidence of 173 per million, versus 164 per million in Hispanics and 118 per million in blacks.

Dr. Rafael Ducos, a children's cancer physician at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, suggested in an AP interview that the differences might be due to under-reporting in areas such as the South.