Many public health experts believe that global pandemics will become more frequent in the coming years. Given the advance warning, health care leaders need to start planning now to encourage screening compliance.
That’s one of the obvious conclusions to be drawn from a new study showing more than 134,000 adults with cancer may have gone undiagnosed in the United States from March to December 2020.
During that period, the COVID-19 crisis and the aggressive avoidance and precautionary measures it triggered left millions of people unable to continue their outpatient care, including cancer screenings.
The study was conducted at the University of Kentucky and published Feb. 22 in the journal Nature. JAMA Oncology.
Lead author Todd Burus and MAS et al. point out that the tally of 134,000 undetected cancers translates into one cancer being missed for every nine cancers detected.
Examining 1.3 million cancer cases reported during the study period, the research team found that the actual cancer incidence rates at all sites were the highest in March 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic response. It found that it was 28.6% lower than expected from May to May.
The number of reported cancers also fell by 6.3% from June to December of that year than expected, and by 13% during the first 10 months of the pandemic.
Other important findings from the study:
- The total rate of screenable cancers decreased by 13.9% compared to the expected rate.
- The highest number of potentially missed cases was in prostate cancer (22,950), followed by breast cancer in women (16,870) and lung cancer (16,333).
- Breast cancer incidence among women showed evidence of a return to previous trends after the first three months of the pandemic, but levels of colorectal, cervical, and lung cancer remained low.
States with the strictest policies to mitigate COVID-19 experienced the worst disruptions in cancer diagnoses from March to May 2020, but all states had largely recovered by December of the same year. Bruss and co-authors report.
However, in highly restrictive states, significant shortfalls in lung, kidney, and pancreatic cancers compared to expected numbers continued into 2021.
The author states in the discussion section:
“Our findings provide important information for current cancer prevention and control efforts. Additionally, these findings will inform how future disaster planning will impact cancer detection. It emphasizes the need to consider what to give.”
This study is available completely free of charge.
