In a recent study of 11,848 patients who had surgery for stage T2 renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the researchers looked at the effect of a delay in having surgery on overall survival. The data were taken from the National Cancer Database.

The study showed that patients who had a delay of 5 to 6 months in their surgery had significantly worse survival compared with patients who had surgery within 2 months of diagnosis. A shorter delay of 3 to 4 months for healthy patients was not associated with worse overall survival.

The information from this study may be used to help doctors and their patients assess the risk of delaying surgery versus potential exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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