Javad Yaghmoorian Khojini,1Ali Osmay Gure,2,*
1. Department of Medical Biotechnology, School of Medicine, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran 2. Department of Medical Biology, Acibadem University, Istanbul, Turkey
Introduction: An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), has rapidly spread from Wuhan, China for the first time. The number of people infected with Covid-19 caused by the new coronavirus in the world has reached 186 million people so far and the death of 4 million people has been confirmed due to the disease. Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and is one of the most common gastrointestinal malignancies, the underlying cause of which is not exactly known. In this study, we will discuss the results presented by some studies on the effects of COVID-19 on hospital admissions and other cases of colorectal cancer patients.
Methods: This review study was done using various update articles, books and authoritative scientific sites.
Results: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a rapidly evolving pandemic infecting more than 180 million people worldwide according to the World Health Organization (WHO) to date. Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. It is the fourth most common cancer in the world in terms of mortality after lung and breast cancer, ranking third among women and among men after lung and prostate cancer. Patients with cancer might be at an increased risk of infection with COVID-19. According to one Meta-analysis study the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in CRC patients was 45.1% in the global population. In a 2020 study in Shanghai, 710 patients with colorectal cancer, the rate of surgery during the COVID-19 epidemic increased by about 15 percent and the average length of hospital stay in these patients increased significantly. In a study conducted in France in 2020 compared to 2019, there was a decrease in the admission and surgery of patients with colorectal cancer, and this amount varied between 10 and 30%. In a study in the UK, this declining trend was much greater in 2020, with a reduction of between 30 and 80% in the admissions and surgeries of patients with colorectal cancer compared to the same time last year. In a study in Italy in 2020, the number of selective colonoscopies decreased sharply but the rate of detected cancer as well as high-risk adenomas increased. A recent study of 73 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 demonstrated that the feces of approximately 53.42% of these patients was positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA. This finding concurred with the other rates published by Wang et al (20.5%), Lee et al (19%) and Yang et al (14%) demonstrating that gastrointestinal and colorectal cancer was one of the most common malignancies among patients with cancer who contracted COVID-19.
Conclusion: This study shows that the trend of hospital admissions of patients with colorectal cancer during the COVID-19 epidemic in the world is not a steady trend and in some countries such as China this trend is increasing and in some countries such as Britain and France has been declining. It is generally recommended to increase health care and appropriate treatment process during the COVID-19 epidemic for cancer patients, especially colorectal cancer.