Abstract
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Barrett’s Esophagus and Esophagogastric Cancer
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted gastroenterology services worldwide
Electronic pathology reports were received by the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR) and used to identify all unique patients diagnosed with histopathologically confirmed EG cancer, or Barrett’s esophagus (BE) (corresponding to Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) location codes T56010 or T56000 in combination with morphology codes D530910 or M73320), between March 1, 2020, and September 12, 2020
Between March and September 2020, the proportion of EG cancer diagnoses declined by 26.6%, compared with the equivalent time frame in 2017 to 2019 (Figure 1A and C)
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted gastroenterology services worldwide. Markar et al[3] demonstrated that by April 2020, activity was more than 90% lower than the previous year in 68% of health trusts in England, with an estimated 750 esophagogastric (EG) cancers undiagnosed. In the United States, 98.6% of centers postponed all elective endoscopies for a mean of 5.8 weeks, with remaining uncertainty on how to address the backlog.[4] The British Society for Gastroenterology (BSG) guidance on restarting endoscopy in the deceleration and early recovery phase of the pandemic continues to advise against surveillance endoscopy, with capacity reserved for urgent procedures.[5] We aimed to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the pathologic diagnosis of Barrett’s esophagus (BE) and EG cancer within population-based databases in Northern Ireland
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