Objective: Head and neck cancer (HNC) often causes respiratory symptoms, so diagnostic delays due to COVID-19 are anticipated. Especially, our institute is a designated medical institute for Class 1 specified infectious diseases, and most of the severe COVID-19 patients in this region were preferentially admitted or transferred. Hereby, we evaluated the trends of the numbers, primary sites and clinical stages of HNC patients before and after COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of all patients diagnosed and treated for HNC from 2015 to 2021 was performed. Especially, 309 cases between 2018 and 2021 were extracted in order to examine a direct impact of COVID-19 pandemic, which were dichotomized into "Pre" group in 2018-2019 and "COVID" group in 2020-2021. They were compared about the distribution of clinical stage, the period between onset of symptom and hospital visit.

Results: HNC patients decreased by 38% in 2020 and by 18% in 2021 compared to average number of patients from 2015 to 2019. Patients of stage 0 and 1 in "COVID" group significantly decreased compared to that in "Pre" group. Cases performed emergent tracheostomy in hypopharyngeal cancer and laryngeal cancer increased in "COVID" group (10.5% vs 1.3%).

Conclusion: Patients with slight symptoms would hesitated to visit hospital after COVID-19, and only a few delays of HNC diagnosis could have increased tumor burden and caused narrowed airway, especially in advanced HPC and LC.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10106817PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anl.2023.04.005DOI Listing

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