At the same time, cancer has become more often diagnosed in the later stages, which is associated with an overload of the healthcare system.
In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic broke out around the world, doctors discovered 556,000 malignant neoplasms in Russians. Meanwhile, a year earlier, 640 thousand new patients with oncological diseases were registered in the country. At that time, it was predicted that in 2020 there would be at least 661,000 of them. This information is provided by Kommersant with reference to the data of the statistical collection of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.
As David Zaridze, head of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology of the Blokhin National Medical Research Center of Oncology, President of the Anticancer Society of Russia, told the publication, before the pandemic, the number of detected cases of cancer in Russia was growing annually. He believes that the decline in cancer detection at a time when all the resources of the healthcare system are thrown into the fight against COVID-19 is due to the cancellation of preventive examinations and the workload of polyclinics.
Zaridze drew attention to the fact that, according to the Accounts Chamber, in the first nine months of 2021, malignant neoplasms were detected in 791,000 Russians. At the same time, in some regions of the Russian Federation, the proportion of patients diagnosed with cancer at a late stage was approximately twice as high as the national figure.
The interlocutor of the publication suggests that this and next years in Russia there will be “an excess of cases of oncology that were not diagnosed in previous years.” According to his sad forecast, the maximum increase in cancer deaths is likely to occur in 2023-2025.
