Tens of 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.
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.
