Does Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic Cause a Delay in the Diagnosis of Gastric Cancer Patients?

The study included the patients diagnosed with gastric cancer during the period between March 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020, in the pandemic group at the Adana City Training and Research Hospital, Department of General Surgery, Divisions of Gastroenterological Surgery and Surgical Oncology. For the baseline group, patients diagnosed with gastric cancer between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019, was included in the same department. Clinical and pathological data of the patients were retrospectively collected from the hospital medical records. The following parameters were compared between the pandemic and baseline periods; age and gender distributions, mean monthly numbers of newly diagnosed patients, CEA and CEA-19.9 levels, the type of the surgery, the location of the tumor, the frequency of the patients receiving neoadjuvant treatment, American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score, length of the hospital stay, clinical staging and pathologic TNM staging.