The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of medical care, including cancer detection and treatment.1,2 While prior studies have documented declines in routine screening volume,3 less is known about the long-term survival of patients diagnosed with cancer during this period.
We studied 640,286 patients who were newly diagnosed with cancer between January 2015 and June 2022. We grouped patients as diagnosed during pre-pandemic (between January 1, 2015, and March 31, 2017) or during the COVID-19 pandemic (between March 11, 2020, and June 30, 2022) periods. Patients diagnosed before the COVID-19 pandemic were matched 4:1 with patients diagnosed during the pandemic period by sex, race, ethnicity, and age. We also accounted for social vulnerability, evidence of metastasis, and other comorbidities in our analysis.
Patients diagnosed with kidney cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic were 25% more likely to die from any cause within three years compared to those diagnosed before the pandemic, as seen in Figure 1. Pandemic-period lung cancer diagnoses were associated with an 11% increase in three-year all-cause mortality for patients diagnosed with lung cancer during the pandemic, while there was a 7% increase in three-year all-cause mortality for those diagnosed with breast cancer during the pandemic compared to those diagnosed prior to the pandemic.
These findings suggest that disruptions in care during the pandemic had measurable adverse effects on outcomes across multiple cancer types.
