Dados do Trabalho

Título

Decreasing on waiting time to start treatment for malignant brain neoplasm during the pandemic in Brazil

Resumo

Introduction
The priority of care given to SARS-COV-2 patients during the COVID-19 pandemic has configured itself as a challenge to the care provided in oncologic treatments. Thus, studies highlight the change in the surgical burden as well as in the time pattern of brain tumor treatments. Thus, it is necessary to understand the impact of the pandemic on the waiting time for the treatment of this disease.
Objective
Analyze whether there was a change in the waiting time for brain tumor treatment during the pandemic of COVID-19.
Method
This is an ecological computational program-based time-series study. The Health Information System (TABNET) database was used, relying on health workers to input data accurately, thus having the corresponding limitations arising from it. Two spreadsheets were generated to look for diagnosis and the treatment start date for malignant brain neoplasm in different ranges. The first is from January 2018 to December 2019, being the pre-COVID period. However, the TABNET system generated it until February of 2020 due to some treatments only being started in this period. The second spreadsheet was generated with data from January 2020 to March 2022 (during COVID).
After that, a script written in Python was built to calculate the time from diagnosis to the start of the treatment, providing weighted average and standard deviation of this time for each spreadsheet.
Results
In the pre-COVID period, on average, there was a 2.56 months interval from the diagnosis to the start of the treatment with a 4.61-month standard deviation (SD) and 7140 patients. During the pandemic, the month interval from the diagnosis to the start of the treatment was 1.58 with a SD of 2.43 months and a total of 6696 patients.
This result of 1 month less wait during pandemics is truly surprising due to the tendency of postponing surgical treatments, necessary in most cases of brain neoplasm.
Although our study is not capable of point the cause of this reduction we elected some possible reasons: lower demand in the health system due to fear of covid, lower number of elective surgeries providing beds for the not-elective ones, and efforts to remove immunosuppressed patients, like oncologic ones, as quickly as possible from hospital settings.
Conclusion
It’s unclear if the reduction of the time from diagnosis to treatment has improved survival or life quality of patients.
Therefore, further studies are needed to understand this complex situation of neuro-oncology during pandemics.

Palavras Chave

Brain Neoplasms; Epidemiology; Medical Oncology; Data Analysis; COVID-19.