Canadian doctors say medical delays from COVID 19-led to more advanced cancer cases
Global News
Canadian doctors say they are seeing patients with more advanced stages of cancer than usual – a phenomenon they are attributing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canadian doctors say they are seeing patients with more advanced stages of cancer than usual — a phenomenon they are attributing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Helmut Hollenhorst, senior medical director for Nova Scotia’s cancer care program, says he thinks cancer patients are presenting with more advanced disease due to pandemic-induced missed or delayed medical appointments.
“From my own practice, we see patients with more advanced disease,” Hollenhorst said in a recent interview, referring to the cancer care centre at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax.
“And we’re not alone on this,” he added. “This is all over the country.”
Firm data to prove this trend isn’t yet available, Hollenhorst said, but he said he is hearing anecdotal evidence from his colleagues across Nova Scotia and Canada about a rise in patients with more serious cancer.
“We do expect as data matures and becomes available we will be able to quantify this impact,” he said.
Dr. Tim Hanna, a non-melanoma skin cancer specialist in Kingston, Ont., says he started to notice a spike in advanced-stage cancer at his clinic in January 2021.
“I observed more advanced cancers among the patients I saw than I have personally ever seen,” Hanna said in an interview Wednesday. This trend lasted about a year at Hanna’s Kingston Health Sciences Centre clinic, he said, with rates of advanced cancer nearing normal in early 2022.
