AACR report: Pandemic led to nearly 10 million missed cancer screenings in 7 months
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
American Association for Cancer Research released a first-of-its-kind report detailing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cancer community, both in patient care and research practice.
The 109-page report outlines the burdens patients and clinicians have experienced, as well as lessons learned throughout the pandemic. It concludes with a Call to Action for Congress to help rebuild the U.S. public health care infrastructure, support medical research and modernize the way patients receive care and take part in clinical trials.
"Obviously, COVID-19 affected all things in everybody’s lives, but for patients with cancer it was really a much harder time,” Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, FAACR, professor of medicine, surgery and molecular and medical pharmacology at University of California, Los Angeles, director of the tumor immunology program at Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, past AACR president, and chair of the report’s steering committee, told Healio. “There were delays in diagnosis, delays in treatment ... and it’s lingering on because certain patients with cancer have lower response to the vaccines, so they continue to be vulnerable for a long time.”
Delays in screening, treatment
One of the clear consequences of the pandemic has been its effect on patient visits to hospitals and clinics. For months, delays in screening, diagnosis and treatment occurred as a result of COVID-19, and these delays may continue to have negative effects on patient outcomes, according to the steering committee.
The AACR report cited:
- an 11% increase in patients diagnosed with inoperable or metastatic cancer during March 2020 to December 2020 compared with the same period in 2019 because of impaired referrals for preliminary cancer diagnoses;
- delays in cancer treatments (including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery); and
- nearly 10 million missed cancer screenings from January through July 2020.
“There is a catch-up (that’s necessary) and you have to go above (the normal numbers) to make sure that we’ve caught up. And part of that is also gaining people’s trust,” Ana Maria Lopez, MD, MPH, MACP, FRCP, professor and vice chair of medical oncology at Sidney Kimmel Medical College and director of integrative oncology, medical director of medical oncology and chief of cancer services at Jefferson Health New Jersey and Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, told Healio.
“‘Yes, it is safe to come back. It is safe to do these screenings,” added Lopez, who also served on the AACR’s steering committee. “But inevitably there will be something else. So how are we prepared for the long term? I think one really strong message from the report is, how do we communicate that science is not static? We are living through a period where we see science evolving.”
The AACR committee reported that racial and ethnic minorities, as well as other medically underserved populations, not only shouldered a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 but also were affected more by disruptions in the cancer care continuum because of the pandemic.
“We know from COVID statistics that Black communities and overall underserved communities had higher death rates due to COVID-19, and these are the same people who have lower rates of early diagnosis of cancer and better care for cancer,” Ribas said. “They were hit on this from both sides; the most vulnerable people suffered the most.”
“It was a terrible perfect storm,” Lopez added. “Again, what are the lessons learned? What can we do? We have to work at the individual, one-on-one level, at the institutional levels and at the legislative levels.”
One lesson the cancer care community learned through the pandemic is that their research is working. More specifically, decades of research into mRNA vaccines for cancer immunotherapies opened the door to ultra-quick development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We had this vaccine so quickly for a series of reasons,” Ribas said. “One of them is there were people who were not well-recognized for many years who had been studying these coronaviruses and a lot of the epidemics that happened, like SARS and MERS, and preparing if there was another one to develop vaccines. And in parallel, the cancer field had been developing RNA vaccines for personalized patient vaccines, where they would take the sequence of the cancer and, in a period of just 2 months, turn it into an RNA vaccine.”
Call to Action
Building off the pandemic shining a light on the necessities of science and research, the AACR report included a Call to Action with recommendations for federal lawmakers to further support efforts to expand and enhance health care.
The AACR called for:
- at least $10 billion for the NIH and its grantees to offset pandemic-related research costs as emergency supplemental funding, as proposed in the Research Investment to Spark the Economy (RISE) Act of 2021;
- funding increases of at least $3.5 billion for NIH and $1.1 billion for the NCI in fiscal year (FY) 2022, for total funding of $46.4 billion for NIH and $7.6 billion for NCI;
- policies that broaden health care coverage and reduce inequities in access to health care, such as expanding Medicaid; and
- increased diversity in clinical trials and efforts to alleviate the financial burden on prospective trial participants by reimbursing patients for ancillary trial-related costs, such as transportation and lodging, as established in the DIVERSE Act.
“The investment by the U.S. government and many governments around the world in science and knowledge reverts back into better treatment. During a period like the pandemic, it’s made a big difference in making a very bad situation a little bit better,” Ribas said. “All of the benefits that we had from fighting COVID-19, the development of vaccines and therapeutics, were based on scientific knowledge that turned into benefiting all of society. That’s what the cancer field has been doing for the last 30 to 40 years — understanding the causes and developing effective treatments.”
References:
American Association for Cancer Research. AACR report on the impact of COVID-19 on cancer research and patient care. Published Feb. 9, 2022. Accessed Feb. 9, 2022.
AACR releases report outlining impact of COVID-19 pandemic on cancer research and patient care. www.AACR.org/covidreport. Published Feb. 9, 2022. Accessed Feb. 9, 2022.
For more information:
Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, FAACR, can be reached at Department of Medicine and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 10833 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024; email: aribas@mednet.ucla.edu.
Ana Maria Lopez, MD, MPH, MACP, FRCP, can be reached at Jefferson Health New Jersey, Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, 900 Medical Center Drive, Suite 209, Sewell, NJ 08080; email: anamaria.lopez@jefferson.edu.
Collapse
AACR report on the impact of COVID-19 on cancer research and patient care. Published Feb. 8, 2022. Accessed Feb. 9, 2022.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts