The impact of COVID‐19 on the presentation, stage and management of head and neck cancer patients: A real‐time assessment.

The purpose of this observational study was to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the presentation, stage and management pattern on newly presented HNC patients during the pandemic era. The data on all newly diagnosed HNC patients at our centre during April-December 2020 (COVID-19 cohort) were collected, and it was compared against the baseline pre-COVID-19 cohort (all new HNC patients diagnosed between April and December 2019). During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was postulated that there might be a delay in cancer patients' presentation, stage migration and changes in management leading to excess cancer mortality.1 However, there is a paucity of real-time objective data to support this, particularly in HNC. [Extracted from the article]