In addition, the prevalence of unhealthy behaviors, including smoking and poor sleep habits, appeared to decline among cancer survivors as well as adults who had no history of cancer during this period.
“Our findings suggest that the pandemic may have motivated people to adopt certain healthier behaviors,” Xuesong Han, PhD, American Cancer Society, Atlanta, said in a statement. In addition, policies implemented in response to the pandemic regarding insurance coverage, unemployment benefits, and financial assistance “may have contributed to the observed positive changes.”
Dr. Han and colleagues noted that “to the best of our knowledge, our study provides the first nationally representative estimates of the effects of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer survivors in the United States.”
The study was published online in Cancer.
Given the considerable upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Han and colleagues wanted to explore how cancer survivors, in particular, were affected during the first year.
The analysis included 57,132 cancer survivors and 1,044,585 adults without cancer who were involved in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
The researchers found that the unemployment rate in 2020 increased by 43% among cancer survivors and by 57% among adults without a cancer history compared with the previous 2 years.
However, the rate of uninsured cancer survivors aged 18-64 years remained relatively stable in 2020 at 8%, compared with 8.8% in 2017-2019.
Notably, the prevalence of insufficient sleep decreased among cancer survivors (43% to 39%), as did smoking (22% to 19%). Among adults without a history of cancer, there was a decline in insufficient sleep (37% to 34.3%) and smoking (16% to 15%). The prevalence of binge drinking decreased among adults with and those without a history of cancer as well.
Obesity rates, however, increased during the first year of the pandemic among cancer survivors (36.5% to 40%) as well as among those with no cancer history (30.8% to 32.7%). In addition, more adults without a cancer history reported an increase in mental distress in 2020 compared with before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The authors suggest that some of the positive trends observed could be explained, in part, by increased enrollment in the Affordable Care Act and by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which increased the federal government’s share of Medicaid costs and prevented states from terminating Medicaid coverage during the pandemic.
“These provisions likely compensated for the loss in employer-sponsored insurance,” the authors noted.
But, they added, “as policies related to the public health emergency expire, ongoing monitoring of long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer survivorship is warranted.”
Dr. Han has received a grant from AstraZeneca outside of the current study.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.