(ORDO NEWS) — Europe faces a powerful cancer epidemic due to coronavirus.
The focus of the European health care system on the coronavirus pandemic threatens the countries of the continent with an “epidemic” of cancer, the Guardian writes, citing a study by the Lancet Oncology commission.
“We are concerned that Europe will face a cancer epidemic in the next ten years if health systems and cancer research are not urgently prioritized,” said study leader Prof Mark Lawler of Queen’s University Belfast.
The rapid repurposing of healthcare systems and the introduction of lockdowns have had negative consequences that still affect the examination and treatment of cancer patients, scientists say.
“To emphasize the scale of the problem, we estimated that during the COVID-19 pandemic across Europe, about one million cases of the disease remained undiagnosed,” the publication quotes the authors of the study.
In addition, now more often than before the pandemic, cancer is detected at later stages than it was before. All this in the future will worsen the quality of life of patients in Europe and reduce survival, experts predict.
The report says that in the first year of the pandemic, doctors in Europe saw one and a half million fewer cancer patients, and every second patient was left without timely treatment – surgery or chemotherapy.
Among other things, the situation with cancer is negatively affected by the postponement and cancellation of clinical trials during the pandemic, the scientists noted.
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