Year: 2022
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: New York City was the first US location to record a coronavirus disease 2019 (coronavirus disease 2019) case on March 1, 2020, and soon became the epicenter of the pandemic.Because of the large number of hospitalizations (1), Governor Cuomo imposed a halt on all elective care from March 22 to June 8, 2020 (2), provoking reduced cancer screening rates (3), delayed cancer care and treatment (4,5).Our aim is to quantify the effect of the "pause" on cancer stage at diagnosis, one of the best indicators of cancer prognosis, using lung cancer as an example of a condition where early diagnosis can dramatically modify survival.Lung cancer cases diagnosed between January 1, 2018 and February 28, 2021 at the Mount Sinai Health System were identified from Mount Sinai's cancer registry, based on ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) codes of C34.00-22 (cases diagnosed at Mount Sinai), as per Commission on Cancer guidelines.For observations that reflected multi-tumor or multi-hospital cases, unique patients were identified by selecting the earliest date of diagnosis.Patients' records was used to obtain stage at diagnosis.The monthly number of diagnoses was averaged across 2018 and 2019 and the ratio of the number of monthly cases in 2020-2021 over the average number of monthly cases in 2018 and 2019 was calculated.The percent of monthly diagnoses with early (0/I/II), late (III/IV) and unknown stage over the total number of monthly diagnoses was examined and was compared to the average percent in 2018 and 2019 from the same month.The analysis included 1,884 patients.There was a sharp drop in the number of diagnoses starting in March
DOI: 10.21037/tlcr-22-191
Institution: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Language: English
Subfield: Oncology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4285524654