Cancer Screening Rates Dropped During Pandemic

New research out this week confirms what many doctors had feared.

Cancer screenings dropped significantly during the pandemic.

Research, published in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, examined data from the Ontario Cancer Registry and found the week-to-week rate of cancer diagnosis dropped 34.3% in March of 2020.

UT Southwestern's Dr. John Sweetenham says one of the most significant declines in screenings at the Simmons Cancer Center in Dallas was for breast cancers

"We saw our screening volumes essentially go away for a couple of months, and then begin to recover from about May of 2020 onwards. If we look back over the whole of 2020, and compare it with the previous year, the number of patients who actually were screened for breast cancer in 2020 was down by about 17% or 18% over the previous year. We saw a fairly significant decline in the number of women coming for breast cancer screening during that time," said Dr. Sweetenham.

The main reasons were pandemic-related, such as lockdowns and fears of coronavirus.

Heidi Slansky, a cancer survivor from Keller, prolonged her regular mammogram by a month, at which point, doctors discovered stage three breast cancer.

She questions what would have happened if she had waited longer to get her mammogram.

"Prognosis would have been very poor at that time. The way that my cancer in particular exploded, it was triple positive cancer. So it's feeding off estrogen progesterone, and the HER2 receptor. It was having a field day! It was crazy how quickly it exploded. If I'd waited even another month, it certainly would have progressed even further. The longer you wait, the harder it is to treat and the more rigorous those treatments become," said Slansky.

Slansky's battle, however, ended in the best way possible.

After she beat cancer, she founded Cancer StrongHER, a non-profit that promotes an active lifestyle for female survivors of all types of cancer through fitness boxing, tennis, yoga, FitCamp, Pilates, Taekwondo and other activities that are free-of-charge to all participants.

Her message to those who have put off their regular cancer screenings:

"Knowledge really is power. I know it's a scary thing to go into those screenings and those mammograms, whatever it is, colonoscopies, it can be scary, but I tell you what, it's scarier if you wait, if you don't have that knowledge," Slanksy said. "If you do go early, you have options. I waited a month and I really didn't have options. I had to get a double mastectomy. I had to go through very aggressive chemo treatment. I had to do radiation. I didn't have a choice. So, to me, the scary part is waiting and not having control or choices in your own health care,"