Missing Cancer Diagnoses

I suspect we will be reading research like this for an extended time.  It is undisputed that there was a lot of missed care during the epidemic, some due to people’s fear of going out or going to medical facilities, some because providers stopped seeing patients in person except in emergencies, some because providers were just overwhelmed with CV-19 cases.  So a lot of preventative care, like screenings, routine physicals, and regular visits for chronic diseases like asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes, didn’t occur.  The consequence of that missed care is later diagnoses of serious disease and exacerbation of chronic conditions.  This study examined the trend in cancer diagnoses early in the epidemic in the US in March through December of 2020.  The authors concluded that about 130,000 diagnoses were missed.  Most of those have undoubtedly been detected by now, as rates of screeening have picked up and disease symptoms would make seeking tretment more likely.  But the likely later stage of detection of cancer means that outcomes will be worse.  It will be somewhat hard to discern, given constant improvments in cancer treatments, but among other things, we might anticipate a rise in cancer deaths.  It is likely that these effects continued for some time into the epidemic, but hopefully detection has returned to the timing and numbers that existed pre-epidemic, if not better.   (JAMA Article)