Significant Decrease in Annual Cancer Diagnoses in Spain during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Real-Data Study

SIMPLE SUMMARY: There is no doubt about the transformation that health systems have undergone in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this may have had a negative impact on other diseases such as cancer. We have analyzed all the cancer patients diagnosed in the first post-pandemic year in two university hospitals that attend 785,000 people and compared them with patients diagnosed in 2019. Our results clearly show that during the first post-pandemic year there has been a significant decrease of 17.2% in the number of patients diagnosed with cancer. However, there were no differences in the number of patients diagnosed between 2018 and 2019 or between 2017 and 2019, so that loss of cancer patients could be attributed to changes made in health systems due to the pandemic. The delay in the diagnosis may have important consequences in the prognosis of cancer patients, so health systems should carry out an effort similar to that made with the pandemic to recover all lost patients who have remained undiagnosed. ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a profound change in health organizations at both the primary and hospital care levels. This cross-sectional study aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the annual rate of new cancer diagnosis in two university-affiliated hospitals. This study includes all the patients with a pathological diagnosis of cancer attended in two hospitals in Málaga (Spain) during the first year of pandemic. This study population was compared with the patients diagnosed during the previous year 2019. To analyze whether the possible differences in the annual rate of diagnoses were due to the pandemic or to other causes, the patients diagnosed during 2018 and 2017 were also compared. There were 2340 new cancer diagnosis compared to 2825 patients in 2019 which represented a decrease of −17.2% (p = 0.0001). Differences in the number of cancer patients diagnosed between 2018 and 2019 (2840 new cases; 0.5% increase) or 2017 and 2019 (2909 new cases; 3% increase) were not statistically significant. The highest number of patients lost from diagnosis in 2020 was in breast cancer (−26.1%), colorectal neoplasms (−16.9%), and head and neck tumors (−19.8%). The study of incidence rates throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the diagnosis of new cancer patients has been significantly impaired. Health systems must take the necessary measures to restore pre-pandemic diagnostic procedures and to recover lost patients who have not been diagnosed.