Dr Sarah Price, Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter COVID-19 and recorded cancer incidence in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink: an interrupted time series analysis

Posted by ma403

4 July 2023

Bio

Sarah Price is a senior research fellow in the Cancer DISCOvery Group at University of Exeter. Her work focuses on clinical and methodological aspects of early cancer diagnosis. She was lead researcher on a Cancer Research UK project evaluating the clinical and health economic impacts of revising the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence suspected-cancer referral guidelines. In methodological work, she has contributed to the development of robust measures of the timeliness of cancer diagnosis for studies of observational data and has expertise in codelist development for observational studies. Her developing research interests include missed opportunities for cancer diagnosis in primary care, the health economics of cancer diagnostics and cancer investigations in people with anxiety and/or depression.

Abstract:

Cancer diagnostic services were badly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fewer patients reported cancer symptoms to their family doctor, referral numbers fell by more than half, and camera testing services all but stopped. The impact on the numbers of cancers diagnosed is not fully understood. Reports suggest that 3,500 fewer people than expected were diagnosed and treated for bowel cancer in England between April and October 2020. The Cancer Registry is the gold standard resource for the type and number of cancer diagnoses as well as stage at diagnosis. However, data for 2020 will not be available for several years.

We are using Clinical Practice Research Datalink (Aurum) data to explore the immediate impact of COVID-19 on the number of cancers diagnosed, and the recovery back to expected levels. We are exploring differences by cancer type, age group and sex and are repeating this for a comparator group of patients with an incidence diagnosis of diabetes, which is generally diagnosed without secondary care input. Having this comparison group will help us to start to differentiate the COVID-19’s impacts on recorded cancer incidence associated with primary and secondary care factors. In this way our results will help us to:

Understand the size and duration of diagnostic delays associated with the pandemic and their recovery.
Lay the groundwork for a subsequent validation study of cancer diagnoses in the CPRD around the time of the pandemic once Cancer Registry data for that period become available.