COVID pandemic led to thousands of missed prostate cancer cases, UK study finds [Video]

Many thousands of prostate cancer cases were missed during the disruption of the COVID pandemic.

Those are the findings of a new study published in BJU International last month.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and other U.K. universities analyzed a dataset of 285,160 participants from OpenSAFELY-TPP, a large, nationally representative dataset of routine health care records.

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They focused on 165,410 men in the U.K. who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between Jan. 2015 and July 2023.

In 2020, diagnoses of prostate cancer dropped by 31% over the prior year.

The decrease was 18% in 2021. 

By 2022, the diagnosed cases had returned to expected levels.

“Given that our dataset represents 40% of the population, we estimate that proportionally the pandemic led …