America is staring down the barrel of an explosion in late stage cancers after over 100,000 cases were missed during the Covid pandemic.
Doctors suspected for years that the disruptions to healthcare and lockdowns led to fewer diagnoses in the early days of the pandemic.
Now, they’ve put a number on it, finding that nearly 130,000 cancers were missed in 2020 and 2021, or 9 percent less than the expected number.
Study author Dr Uriel Kim, a researcher at Case Western University in Ohio, said: ‘If cancer incidence rates do not improve further, a surge of patients with more advanced disease may be anticipated in future years.’
Screening for breast cancer is recommended to begin at age 45 and continue every year. Doctors recommend testing at different ages and intervals based on your gender, family history and personal risk factors, like smoking
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Dr Pat Basu, the President of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, who was not involved in the study, said that early on, doctors were focused on flattening the curve of Covid cases.
He said: ‘However, another curve that is not often mentioned also requires our urgent attention, namely, the ticking time bomb that is flying under the radar, and which we call the cancer “Shadow Curve.”
The researchers found that cancer diagnoses bounced back up to nearly meet expectations in 2021, but are still behind.
During the pandemic, many screening centers closed during lockdown, others suffered from severe staffing shortages.
This meant that 9.4million screening tests that should’ve happened, didn’t, according to the National Cancer Institute.
This affected all doctors offices- a 2021 report from the American Medical Association found that 40 percent of people admitted to missing medical appointments during the pandemic.
Even if people could get to clinics, many opted not to – out of fears of catching the virus.
In the 2021 study, they found 57 percent of respondents skipped the office out of fear of COVID exposure.
Added together, doctors were bracing for the impact of the pandemic on cancer and other diseases.
They feared that missed diagnoses could create a wave of more deadly disease, Julianne Cooley, a senior statistician who has studied this gap at UC Davis but was not involved with the present research, said
Dr Cooley said: ‘Because so many people with cancer went without in-person health care and screenings, they’re likely to be diagnosed at a later stage when their prognosis is worse.’
Dr Kim’s study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, aimed to put a number on that problem.
To do so, the team of researchers analyzed over 15million invasive cancer cases from 2000 to 2021. This gave them an idea of where cancer rates would’ve been during the pandemic.
Their report found that there were 759,810 cancer cases diagnosed in 2020, but their model suggests that there was likely 127,931 cases missed.
This represents an 8.6 percent decrease for the whole year, but during parts of the year the number of diagnoses dropped by as much as 50 percent.
The biggest dip was in lung, prostate and skin cancers. Men had a larger dip as did people in counties with low poverty rates and high education.
In 2021, rates rebounded to close to normal projections – affecting 825,645 people in the year. This was off from what doctors expected only by 2764 cases.
Dr Kim said: ‘Our analysis revealed that cancer detection and diagnosis improved broadly in 2021 after substantial disruptions in 2020’.
Major medical organizations, like the American College of Surgeons and the American Cancer Society, moved to address this concern in early 2021.
Kelsey Riddle, 32, mistook her initial stage two lymphoma symptoms, which included itchy legs, for allergies
Bella Johnston, 27, was initially told by doctors that her signs of rare throat cancer were an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia and by the time she finally got the right diagnosis, she ‘looked like death’
These two organizations paired up to provide support to 748 local cancer clinics to supplement their screening programs and get people back into the office.
Efforts like these could’ve helped flatten the curve in 2021, as could the lifting of lockdown.
Cancer screening is a crucial cornerstone of modern cancer care – because catching the disease early can be the difference between life and death.
If cancer has the opportunity to grow undetected into the body, it can spread to more parts of the body, becoming more entrenched and harder to beat with traditional therapies.
According to the National Cancer Institute: ‘By the time symptoms appear, the cancer may have grown and spread. This can make the cancer harder to treat or cure’.
Young women in particular have taken to social media to share their late stage cancer diagnoses in hopes of raising awareness about the importance of regular doctors visits and listening to your body.
Grad student Kelsey Riddle, 32, had her stage 2 lymphoma mistaken for allergies, but was able to beat her cancer. Bella Johnston, 27, was initially told by doctors that her signs of rare throat cancer were an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia – and ‘looked near death’ by the time she was diagnosed.
So physicians recommend regular appointments to screen for disease and check up on other warning signs. The age and frequency of screening that doctors recommend differs based on your age, gender and family history.
For example, if one of your parents had early-onset colon cancer, doctors might recommend your screening begins earlier than average.
In general though, the ACS recommends men get screened for prostate cancer starting at age 50. Current or former smokers should begin testing for lung cancer at the same age.
