Gastrointestinal Cancers
'Shattering': Why Even a Month's Cancer Delay Matters
Medscape
Prof Karol Sikora, oncologist in London, commented recently on a paper presented in The British Medical Journal, looking at mortality due to cancer treatment delays.
This is a meta-analysis done by a group in Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, also at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and King's College London; principal researcher Ajay Aggarwal, associate professor.
Prof Sikora’s comments:
- We know that delay in cancer treatment is bad. What we don't know is how much delay is permissible.
- Paper looks at the consequence of a 4 week delay in seven cancers, including colon and rectum, by reviewing publications over a 20-year span.
- They looked at the increased risk of death for a large number of indications. And it turned out to be 6% to 8% increase if there's a 4-week delay.
- Different cancers have different routes of spread, and different levels of aggression. And so, for an individual patient, it's not possible to make the prediction of what the delay would cause.
- Will it change the way cancer services are run? I hope so. I think it's not an emergency. We don't have to treat cancer the same day it's diagnosed, but we have to really smarten up the upfront diagnostic pathways, and I think we'll see some of that going on over the next year or 2 once we get over the COVID-19 problems.