Fewer cases of children’s cancer picked up during Covid pandemic, study finds

The number of children and young adults diagnosed with cancer dropped significantly during the first wave of the Covid pandemic, researchers have found.

The Teenage Cancer Trust expressed “enormous concern” over the findings and said it was essential to understand how the drop has affected young patients.

Researchers from the University of Oxford sought to find how the pandemic had affected children with cancer. They examined incidence rates, length of time before diagnosis and cancer-related intensive care admissions for children and people up to the age of 25.

Data from February to August 2020 was compared to data from the same period in the three preceding years.

The researchers found that 380 cases were diagnosed in the six-month period of 2020, a 17 per cent drop on earlier years.

There were bigger drops in specific cancers such as tumours of the central nervous system and lymphomas, which fell by 38 per cent and 28 per cent respectively.

Children were more than twice as likely to end up in intensive care before being diagnosed, suggesting they were sicker by the time of diagnosis.

The findings of the study will be presented to the National Cancer Research Institute conference on Friday.

The study concluded: “The Covid-19 pandemic has led to substantial reduction in childhood, teenage and young adult cancer detection during the first wave, with an increase in cancer-related ICU admissions, suggesting more severe baseline disease at diagnosis.”

One of the authors, Dr Defne Saatci, said: “Spotting cancer early and starting treatment promptly gives children and young people the best chance of surviving.

“We already know that the Covid-19 pandemic led to worrying delays in diagnosis and treatment for many adults with cancer, so we wanted to understand how the pandemic affected children's cancer services.”

Lead researcher Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox said that the findings on intensive care suggested sick children waited longer to see a doctor during the period studied.

She said: “As we recover from the pandemic, it's vital that we get diagnosis of cancer in children and young people back on track as quickly as possible.”

Kate Collins, chief executive of the Teenage Cancer Trust, said that until the Oxford study, evidence of the pandemic’s impact on young cancer patients had been scarce.

She said: “Too often young people with cancer are forgotten or overlooked, especially in data collection, making them invisible in the system.

“Even before the pandemic, we knew that young people's route to diagnosis could be long and complicated. Early diagnosis can save lives.

“The fact the pandemic has delayed diagnosis is an enormous concern and it is essential to understand not only the reasons the pandemic affected diagnosis but the impact this is having on children and young people with cancer, and what they need now from the healthcare services who care for them.”

The pandemic led to the NHS developing its largest ever patient backlog, with more than five million people waiting for hospital treatment in England alone.

A recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research said the full backlog of cancer patients could take a decade to be cleared and that it was too late for many patients to be cured.

Data from NHS England shows that the number of urgent cancer patients who waited more than two weeks to see a doctor was the highest on record in September, as was the number of people who were left waiting more than a month for treatment.

However, the number of people starting treatment for cancer in September was had risen above the pre-pandemic level.