Progress in reducing deaths from breast cancer has been put at risk because of lockdown and the prioritisation of Covid above all other diseases (as well as the reluctance of people to “burden” the NHS thanks, in part, to Government messaging), with more than 10,000 fewer patients in England alone having started treatment in the past year compared to the year before. The Guardian has the story.
According to an analysis of NHS England figures by Cancer Research U.K. (CRUK), about 38,000 fewer cancer patients began treatment between April 2020 and March 2021, compared with the same period a year earlier. Just under 28% of these were breast cancer patients, equating to about 10,600 people.
With CRUK noting that 2018 figures suggest about 15% of new cancers are breast cancer, it seems the disease has been disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic, with the charity saying the majority of those who have missed out on breast cancer treatment are likely to be people who have yet to be diagnosed, with the vast majority in an early stage of the disease.
Cancer that is detected early is generally more treatable.
The charity said the cancers may not have been picked up in part because of the pause in breast cancer screening during the early part of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to another charity, Breast Cancer Now, almost one million British women, including about 838,000 in England, missed a breast cancer screening appointment during the height of the first wave of coronavirus.
However, CRUK said other factors behind the drop may include the reluctance of some to seek help for symptoms when the Covid waves were at their peaks, either because of concerns about burdening the NHS or because they were afraid of catching Covid.
The charity said the figures suggested progress in reducing breast cancer deaths could be at risk: while the disease is the fourth most common cause of cancer death in the U.K., mortality rates have dropped almost 40% since the 1970s.
Dr Ajay Aggarwal, a Consultant Clinical Oncologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS trust, whose own work has suggested diagnosis delays caused by the pandemic may lead to 3,500 deaths in England from four main cancers in the next five years, said the latest figures confirmed what was feared at the beginning of the Covid outbreak when cancer services were significantly disrupted.
“This also confirms work recently undertaken in south-east London, where during the first wave of the pandemic, across a region of 1.7 million people, there were 30% fewer diagnoses of breast cancer,” he said. “This is likely to worsen when considering the cumulative impact of the second wave.”
He said similar trends were being seen across a range of other cancers. “For those eventually presenting, the data suggests – and clinical experience – that patients are presenting with more advanced, complex disease, which is either incurable or associated with worse prognosis compared to if they had been diagnosed earlier.”
Worth reading in full.
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Boris “lockdown also cures breast cancer and remember 3 weeks to flatten the curve”.
Devi Sridhar&co: If it saves one life, aka with/from Covid death, Covid
established by a (bogus and fraudulent) positive PCR test….
“For those eventually presenting, the data suggests – and clinical experience – that patients are presenting with more advanced, complex disease, which is either incurable or associated with worse prognosis compared to if they had been diagnosed earlier.”
Which is just and exactly a part of the plan. Once you have come around to understanding this- see Mike Yeadon’s views and his and others comments under Will’s article today- this becomes very obvious and everything starts to make, evil, sense.
Covid kills people on average aged over the average life expectancy with lots of illnesses, it obviously sense to harm the young and fit with only a few decades of quality life left…
You see if a million or so younger people aged around 40 die with a QALY total of 40,000,000 is obviously less than the 100,000 on 3 months to live without covid with a 25,000 QALY total it’s simple maths than Fergusson could do.
With new Stats we need a new maths.
/sarcasm
A friend who is charge nurse on a respiratory ward at a large hospital in Edinburgh told me in October last year that he was speaking to lung cancer specialist nurse who he works closely with who was horrified at the amount of patients with advanced lung cancers who were presenting for the first time. I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet of FOI requests to NHS Trusts and of the 9 I’ve got info for so far their hospitals have seen over half a million less admissions and 6000 less cancer diagnoses than in 2019. That’s just 9 of them.
Exactly so. What you report seems to bear out my thought that the 3,500 deaths (perhaps it should be 35,000, and that would likely be too low) is far short of the cancer hecatomb in the making.
with a QALY loss of 3 months for most COVID deaths, it doesn’t take many deaths of younger people to dishonoured by the National Covid service.
The good Dr. Aggarwal’s figure of 3,500 deaths over 5 years for all England seems extraordinarily low, when viewed in the light of the reported figures for missed diagnoses and lost treatments. The steep decline in GP attendance and referrals is but one aspect that must surely be indicative of problems in the making. This is especially so if he is looking at not one, but four main cancers (breast, lung, prostate and bowel). I am not a doctor or statistician (or even an off-beam modeller like Ferguson), but my understanding is that lung cancer is particular lethal, even if diagnosed early.
Although his objective and highly critical views on the dire effects of lockdowns on the treatment of his speciality of cancers seem to get him some stick from the usual halfwit suspects, Professor Karol Sikora, from what I have heard, fears for much greater future mortality through undiagnosed, late-diagnosed or inadequately-treated cancers.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he says: “I think we can be confident that we will be able to move to stage 4 on [19 July], on the basis of everything we now know.”
3 weeks to flatten the curve! lol
“I think we can be confident that we will be able to move to stage 4 on [19 July], on the basis of everything we now know.”
‘… nothing in the data … nothing in the data …’
Zero honesty/respect/credibility.
Yet more proof that Wancock is a Cretin
Matthew 7:20 “Therefore, by their fruit you will recognise them (as false prophets)”
By his shite, shall you know Matt Hancockwomble, most of it comes out of his mouth.
Many more headlines like this and lockdownistas will claim that it has cured cancer
Of course!!!, don’t you know DB, that there wasn’t a single case of the “flu” anywhere, at all, in the whole of the country, not nohow, not never!!!
We also didn’t have the usual norovirus season but suddenly vomiting and diarrhoea were added to the list of symptoms of covid infection. 😁😁
Things may not be as bad as people might think.
I have recently read ‘Snowball in a Blizzard: a Physicians Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine’. The title refers to finding cancers in mammograms It’s very interesting, one aspect being US cancer rates and deaths, where despite improving success in finding and treating cancer deaths have been fairly constant for decades. Thus either more people are getting cancer and treatments have improved or screening is finding people who won’t die of cancer and having no effect on those that will. Either way, failing to screen could have little or no effect on cancer deaths, perversely doing good by saving unnecessary worry and medical treatment.
To be clear, the above is a general point but also applies to the current late presentation of cancers. We won’t know for some time whether these people will recover anyway, would have died anyway or have suffered by late referral. I will leave that issue to experts in the field.
Kill women. Save the NHS.
So how many of these people were “reluctant to burden the NHS” and how many were due to the NHS not willing to see patients?