Coronavirus Could Upend Cancer Trends in the U.S.
He notes that increases in incidence and deaths from cancer due to COVID-19 may also be hidden, complicated by the fact that incidence, for example, may even dip for a while if fewer people are getting screening and fewer cancers are actually detected.
As the pandemic began to surge, cancer doctors typically evaluated each of their patients to decide whether they needed to come in for their treatments or whether they could safely put off the chemotherapy infusion or radiation session for a week or more. Nancy Fleming, a former hospital pharmacist who was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in 2019 after surviving breast cancer in 2003, receives an infusion of andrug once a month at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Mass.
One such policy, however, was harder for patients to accept. Many cancer centers stopped allowing visitors to come with patients during their treatment appointments, which can stretch for several hours since the chemotherapy infusions themselves typically take at least 30 minutes. “It’s such a comfort to have family there,” says Fleming. “When you are a patient, when you are ill, it’s sometimes hard for you to absorb everything you are hearing. It’s always good to have an advocate with you.
Similar adjustments are possible for radiation treatment in some cases. Normally, radiation therapy is broken up into smaller, daily fractions in order to preserve the healthy tissue around cancers from the toxic effects of single blast. For breast cancer patients, recent, albeit early studies that followed patients for five years, suggested that significantly shorter courses of treatment—given over five days compared to 30, for example—could be equally as effective in controlling the cancer.
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