With the federal government recommending that elective and non-essential health services be put on hold for the foreseeable future as the U.S. tries to prevent the continued spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), it’s natural to ask whether millions of people are going to miss crucial cancer screenings — resulting in a spike in the number of cases when things get back to normal.
We know it’s a fairly depressing question in the middle of the pandemic, but if you crunch the numbers, it seems reasonable to ask if the pandemic will erode years of progress on cancer rates due to early detection.
Read MoreTo put it into perspective, more than 39 million mammograms are performed in the United States every year, and the American Cancer Society estimates that 325,000 people will be diagnosed with breast cancer — either invasive or non-invasive — annually. When women in the in the recommended age range (annual mammograms for women ages 45 to 55, and bi-annual for women older than 55) are no longer able to able to access these screening methods, the number of undiagnosed and untreated cases could very well skyrocket.
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For example, if federal recommendations mandate that non-essential health services remain on hold for the next 12 months, many of those 325,000 people who would have been diagnosed will not seek medical attention because they will not notice symptoms or will not consider their symptoms serious enough to be deemed an “essential” health service during the current pandemic. While the U.S. has not officially put a halt on cancer screenings, other nations, like Wales, have paused screening programs to focus on treating coronavirus.
Other common cancers, such as colorectal cancer, have also seen incredible spikes in survival rates in recent decades — but those are largely due to screening programs. More than 147,000 cases of the disease are diagnosed annually in the U.S. — but this is a cancer that is largely preventable with screening. That’s because during routine colonoscopies, doctors look for things called polyps, which are growths that can eventually turn into cancer.
“Polyps are a precursor to colon cancer,” Dr. Heather Yeo, a colorectal cancer surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview on screening guidelines. “For a typical colon polyp to go from a polyp to a cancer takes about 10 years. The usual guidelines are that we screen someone every 10 years.”
If a polyp is detected during a colonoscopy, it can be removed before it turns into cancer.
Dr. Heather Yeo explains why early detection is so important for colon cancer.
And colon cancer awareness campaigns have been doing an amazing job at getting more people in for their regular colonoscopies. More than 19 million colonoscopies were performed in the U.S. in 2017, according to iData Research. But with massive disruptions to our regular health care system, it’s entirely possible that these positive advances could come to a halt.
The current pandemic could also restrict peoples’ access to their dermatologists, leading to undiagnosed cases of skin cancer, which is — by far — the most common cancer in the United States. The American Cancer Society estimates that there are about 5.4 million new cases of skin cancer diagnosed in the U.S. every year — with the American Academy of Dermatology saying around 9,500 people are diagnosed every single day.
While many skin cancers are diagnosed in the early stages, and can be removed with simple in-office procedures, if people don’t have access to a dermatologist to get checked out — these diseases will progress.
Keep Tele-Medicine in Mind
As we work together as a country to avoid coming into contact with or spreading COVID-19, keeping an eye on your health overall is still important as well. Many doctors offices have either already set up, or are in the process of setting up, a tele-medicine system. In these uncertain times, the “if you feel something, say something” approach to cancer prevention should still be implemented. Doctors should be able to determined during a tele-medicine meeting if further testing is required.
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