The gap between a cancer diagnosis and the start of treatment has widened by about 10 days to two weeks over the past decade, depending on the cancer, according to a study of more than 2.7 million American patients published this week in JAMA Surgery.
The analysis, which used the National Cancer Database maintained by the American College of Surgeons, examined patients with stage 1 to 3 breast, colon, lung, gastric, pancreatic or esophageal cancer who were eligible for surgery at diagnosis. Median time from diagnosis to first-course treatment increased for all six of those cancers between 2012 and 2023.
