Changes in clinical presentation, management, and survival outcomes in patients affected by colorectal cancer following COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As an extended analysis of the COVID-DELAY study, we aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on diagnosis, staging, and survival outcomes among patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis performed from 2019 to 2022. METHODS: All consecutive newly diagnosed CRC patients referred to 11 Italian Oncology Departments between March and December 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 were enrolled. Access rate, demographics, diagnostic-therapeutic temporal intervals, and first-line progression-free survival (PFS) and OS among metastatic patients were assessed. RESULTS: Compared to 2019 (n = 690), an initial global reduction in new CRC cases in 2020 (n = 564, -18.3%) was observed, followed by a progressive increase in new CRC diagnoses in 2021 (n = 748, + 8.4%) and 2022 (n = 756, + 9.6%); a higher rate of TNM stage IV tumors was diagnosed in 2020 (35.4%) and 2021 (31.0%) compared to 2019 (29.6%), with normalization in 2022 (26.4%) (P < .001). Not clinically relevant differences between histological diagnosis and first oncological examination, cytohistological diagnosis and systemic treatment start, first oncological appointment and systemic treatment start, treatment start and first radiological assessment between 2020 and 2021-2022 years were found. After propensity score matching according to the year of diagnosis, median OS was significantly worse in 2020, 2021, and 2022 compared to 2019 (27.6 vs 24.8 vs not reached vs 38.9 months, respectively) (P < .001). Concordantly, the median PFS was significantly worse with each passing year: 13.0 vs 11.1 vs 9.2 vs 7.2 months in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively (P = .00027). CONCLUSIONS: A progressive normalization in the rate of new CRC diagnosis as well as TNM stages at diagnosis, in 2021 and 2022 compared to 2020 and 2019, was found. The increase in new CRC cases might have affected some diagnostic-therapeutic time intervals in 2021-2022 years compared to 2020. Significantly, compared to the pre-pandemic phase, pandemic years were independently associated with worse PFS and OS outcomes in patients affected by metastatic disease.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".