LAUSR

In the last two years, the world has been conquered by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). During the first year of the pandemic, delays in cancer diagnoses were observed for several types of tumors all over the world [1–4]. This might be caused by healthcare congestions and drop in preventive healthcare in fear of COVID-19 including disruption of screening programs [5,6]. As a consequence, it has been suggested that the number of tumors diagnosed in advanced stages will increase. This trend will need to be monitored in upcoming years. However, such effect has already been reported by some investigations on breast cancer [7–10]. For colon cancer, contrary results have been published. Two studies observed elevated numbers of advanced tumor stages [7,11] but another investigation reported no effect [10]. These findings reveal that further investigation of a potential associations between a pandemic-associated decrease in diagnoses and a parallel increase in tumor stages in large well-designed studies is needed. Consequently, we used the data of the Cancer Registry Rhineland-Platinate and analyzed data on 4,785 colon, 1,045 pancreatic, 6,834 breast and 5,780 prostate tumors diagnosed in the years 2019 to 2020. These four cancer sites were selected because they represent the two most frequent female and male cancers with low mortality rates (breast and prostate), colon with medium incidence and mortality rates and pancreatic cancer with low incidence and high mortality rates [12]. The herein performed analyses were based on entire years to facilitate comparability with other data sources such as nationwide data of the Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin, Germany. 2019 was used as refence year only, because incidence rates documented by the Cancer Registry of Rhineland-Palatinate are stable over the past years [12].