1581P Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with head and neck cancer assisted in a public cancer center in Brazil

Veloso, G. G. Viana; Rodrigues, A. Nogueira

Background: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 400,000 Brazilians have died and its impact on other diseases is yet to be revealed. Due to contingency strategies, there was a significant reduction in screening programs and this will probably affect cancer treatment outcomes. There is no updated national data regarding the real impact on delaying diagnosis and cancer treatment in Brazil. Objective: To analyze whether the COVID-19 pandemic impacted delaying cancer treatment, yielding more advanced cases as analyzing patients’ clinical features before oncological treatment. Methods: This is a retrospective cross-sectional study with patients assisted in a public cancer center in southeastern Brazil between 2019 and 2020 with a comparison of patients’ clinical features in both years. We analyzed all 207 patients with head and neck treated in 2019 and 2020 (85 and 122 patients, respectively) and stratified them by clinical stage (CS), tumor size, lymph node status (LNS), the occurrence of metastatic disease (MD), body mass index (BMI), need of enteral nutrition, age, performance status (PS) and the indication of exclusive palliative care. We performed comparisons between these groups using Student t-test and chi-square test with a significance level of 5%. Results: Our results reported a statistically significant difference on tumor size (p 0,024);in 2019 50,6% of the tumors were classified as T4 in comparison with 66,4% in 2020. Data showed no statistically significant difference among groups regarding age (median of 56y in 2019 and 58,5y in 2020;p 0,056), BMI (47% had a BMI below 20 on each group, p 0,595), need of enteral nutritional (54,1% in 2019 and 59,8% in 2020, p 0,254), CS (75,3% had stage IV disease in 2019 and 81,1% in 2020 – p 0,486), LNS (42% were N2 in 2019 and 38,5% in 2020, p 0,243), MD (9,4% in 2019 and 13,9% in 2020, p 0,326), PS (59% had PS 1 in 2019 and 45% in 2020, p 0,061) and indication of exclusive palliative care (4,7% in 2019 and 10,7% in 2020, p 0,125). Conclusions: The real impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in cancer treatment is yet to be discovered but so far, our results from 2020 patients indicated a tendency of advanced primary tumor size at the time of cancer diagnosis. Legal entity responsible for the study: The authors. Funding: Has not received any funding. Disclosure: All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.