One study suggests that almost 134,000 cancer cases were missed during the first year of the Covid pandemic.
Researchers at the University of Kentucky made the surprising prediction after comparing the number of cancers expected to be detected from March to December 2020 with the number that were actually detected.
Detection rates fell almost 30 percent during this period, they said, with patients with prostate, female breast and lung cancer most likely to miss their disease.
It happened when hospitals turned over entire wards to fight the virus and patients stayed away from emergency rooms for fear of “being a burden” or contracting the virus.
Experts warned that many of the patients whose diagnosis was missed would likely have their cancer diagnosed later, when it was more advanced and more difficult to treat.
The graph above shows the number of cancers diagnosed (green line) versus the number expected to be diagnosed.
The study only looked at data from 2020, but there are indications that more cases were missed in 2021 and 2022 as hospitals remained overwhelmed with Covid patients.
Data suggests that up to 10 million cancer screenings were missed in 2020 and 2021, for conditions such as breast and colon cancer. Another study on breast and lung cancer screening found that the number of appointments kept decreased by 25 percent during the same period.
Unlike other diseases, such as viruses, cancers occur at constant and predictable rates among the population each year.
This means that when the number of cases detected decreases slightly, this suggests that many cases are being missed, rather than that the disease is disappearing.
The researchers, led by Dr. Todd Burus, an oncologist who led the study, wrote in the study: “Unlike other population health outcomes studied, a decline in new cancer diagnoses in 2020 does not indicate that the cancer incidence in the US has decreased, but rather that new cancers have not been detected.
“The longer the cancer remains undetected, the greater the risk of tumor progression and the lower the chances of survival and other positive outcomes for patients.”
For your study, published in JAMA OncologyThe researchers analyzed data from more than 1.2 million cancer cases recorded between January 2018 and December 2020.
They were stored in the US Cancer Statistics database from 2001 to 2020, a national repository that records all cancer diagnoses nationwide.
Of the cases, 657,000 (or 50 percent of the total) were in men, while 757,000 were in people 65 years or older (58 percent) and more than one million (or 82 percent) were in white people.
Initially, the researchers conducted an analysis, adjusting for factors such as time of year, to predict the number of cancers expected from March to December 2020.
They then compared this to the number of cancers diagnosed during that same period, revealing a drop of 28 percent, or almost 134,000 cases.
Their data showed that prostate cancer was the most commonly missed, with 22,950 fewer cases diagnosed than expected.
The second most commonly missed was female breast cancer, with 16,870 fewer cases detected, followed by lung cancer, with 16,333 fewer cases detected.
Doctors have said many patients did not come forward until their symptoms were more advanced, making the cancer more difficult to treat (file image)
Overall, melanoma (or skin cancer) saw the steepest drop in detections, down 43 percent.
But the researchers noted that there were drops in diagnoses of all cancers, including the deadliest types like pancreatic cancer, where detection rates fell six percent.
Doctors revealed a year after the virus first emerged that many patients had early warning signs of cancer, such as changes in bowel movements, but waited until they were more advanced before seeking help.
The cancer death rate in the United States fell 33 percent between 1991 and 2020, data showed, amid advances in detection and treatments. However, there are fears that the Covid pandemic has reversed some of these advances.
