An increase in aggressive, advanced cancers since the pandemic began is supported by some early data from the United States, as well as by major cancer institutes.
Concerns about Covid may have subsided as vaccines and treatments, as well as multiple waves of disease, have largely protected the population from the possibility of serious illness, but the effects it has left and will continue to leave, either immediately or due to infectionor impliedly, as in his case A vaccine from AstraZeneca, continue to engage sick people and the medical community. Among the most serious concerns, perhaps, is the connection of the coronavirus to the appearance of rare forms of cancer in the post-Covid era.
For example, a patient in his 40s had a rare and deadly form of bile duct cancer that usually occurs in people 70 and older, Kashyap Patel, CEO of Carolina Blood and Cancer Care Associates, et al. buy
There were other strange occurrences: patients dealing with multiple types of cancer appearing almost simultaneously, as well as more than a dozen new cases of other rare cancers.
An increase in aggressive, advanced cancers since the pandemic began is supported by some early data from the United States, as well as by major cancer institutes.
Many believe the increase is largely due to people fearing the health care system during the pandemic, which can lead to late or even advanced diagnoses. After all, it was something experts warned about during the pandemic, urging people not to skip scheduled preventive tests.
When the first wave of the coronavirus hit the United States, health officials predicted an increase in cancer cases. Study in Lancet Oncology It analyzed data showing an increase in stage 4 cancers for many types of cancer at the end of 2020. Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, UC San Diego Health and other major institutions also released data showing a steady upward trend in cancer cases.
Xuesong Han, scientific director of health services research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the Lancet Oncology study, attributed the jump to people delaying or not taking tests because of fear of contracting the coronavirus or financial constraints. it was a period when many businesses were closed due to the pandemic). However, he acknowledges that the biological mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, may also play a role.
“I have no data to support this idea,” he says. “But it’s an important question to pursue,” he said.
The idea that some viruses can cause or accelerate cancer is not new. Scientists have recognized this possibility since the 1960s, and today researchers estimate that 15% to 20% of all cancers worldwide are caused by infectious agents such as HPV, Epstein-Barr, and hepatitis B. Years before we get definitive answers on whether the coronavirus is at least partially responsible for the rise in cancer cases, scientists like Patel are urging the U.S. government to prioritize the question, knowing it could affect the treatment and management of the disease. millions of cancer patients in the coming decades.
“We haven’t studied the virus well enough,” Douglas C. Wallace, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. “The impact of re-infection with the virus over our lifetime is going to be more significant than people think,” he said.
However, the truth is that there is no real-world data linking SARS-CoV-2 to cancer, and some scientists are skeptical.
John T. Schiller, a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health and a pioneer in the study of viruses that cause cancer, says that pathogens known to cause cancer stay in the body for a long time. However, a class of respiratory viruses, including but not limited to coronaviruses, influenza, and RSV, infect the patient and usually disappear, so they are not thought to cause cancer.
David Tuveson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center and former president of the American Association for Cancer Research, says there is no evidence that the coronavirus can directly affect cells and turn them into cancer. However, he says a number of small and early studies, many published in the past nine months, suggest that coronavirus infection can trigger inflammatory conditions and other responses that could theoretically help cancer cells grow. He actually thinks how Covid affects the body can be compared to how environmental stressors like tobacco, alcohol, asbestos or microplastics affect the body.
“Covid destroys the body,” Tuveson said, explaining that autopsies of people who died of Covid-19 show premature tissue aging, which itself acts as a breeding ground for cancer.