You can do this research starting from today, or read them in 6 years :)
Hypothesis:
- During the pandemic many patients have delayed their screening programs and this made some delayed diagnosis of tumors.
- There are claims that screening programs are not effective in catching some cancers (analogy to birds), and causing over-diagnosis on others (analogy to turtles). They are only effective in stepwise developing slowly growing neoplasms (analogy to rabbits).
Questions:
- Are the screening programs really delayed?
- Are there any decrease in cancer diagnosis?
- Are the peri-pandemic era cancer patients more likely to be diagnosed late?
- Does this delay caused decrease in overall and disease free survival?
Methods:
- Get data from centers.
- Check yearly cancer data.
- Follow-up them.
- Calculate survival and hazard status per cancer type.
