Reduced Pancreatic Cancer Survival During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) had the worst prognosis of any of the common cancers, with only a quarter of patients still alive 1 year from diagnosis. 1 Given the unprecedented disruption to health care services during the pandemic, 2 it is perhaps unsurprising that pancreatic cancer outcomes would have worsened, with a growing body of evidence to support this hypothesis. The more important questions, rather, are what was the extent of and reasons for this impact, and what lessons can we learn to plan for future health care disruptions to minimize "collateral damage"?We recently published results from our British single-center study, suggesting a halving of median survival for PDAC patients diagnosed during the pandemic compared to a