{"doi":"10.1093/jnci/djaf175","title":"Incidence of rare cancers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a US population-based study","abstract":"INTRODUCTION: Recent media reporting has suggested an increase in the incidence of rare cancers in 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concern for possible carcinogenic effects of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection. We aimed to identify cancers that increased in incidence in the United States during 2021 compared with 2018-2019. METHODS: We analyzed data from Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER-22) using a systematic classification schema including rare cancers. We estimated age-standardized incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) comparing the year 2021 to 2018-2019 for 693 individual cancer types and highlight those with an aIRR > 1 based on a Bonferroni-corrected P-value threshold. Cancer types of particular interest included cholangiocarcinoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, Kaposi sarcoma, and lung cancer. RESULTS: Among 693 unique cancer types evaluated, 9 showed a significant increase in incidence in 2021 compared with 2018-2019 and did not also increase in prior years, including 4 subtypes of thymoma (type-A aIRR = 2.50; type-AB aIRR = 2.78; type-B aIRR = 1.90; type not otherwise specified aIRR = 1.60), granulosa cell tumor of the ovary (aIRR = 2.72), peripheral neuroectodermal tumors of the bone (aIRR = 10.6) and soft tissue (aIRR = 3.20), pheochromocytoma (aIRR = 4.59), and paraganglioma (aIRR = 3.30). Increases for all 9 cancer types could be attributed to changes in cancer registry reporting practice. Cancer types of particular interest did not increase in incidence during 2021. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Our study does not support an increase in cancer incidence in the United States in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to monitor future trends, which may reveal longer-term effects of COVID-19.","journal":"JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute","year":2025,"id":545259,"datarank":0.10397207708399181,"base_score":0.6931471805599453,"endowment":0.6931471805599453,"self_citation_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.6911,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":448678,"name":"Jeremy S. Miller","orcid":"0000-0002-3068-5990","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":281460,"name":"Meredith S. Shiels","orcid":"0000-0001-8390-6091","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":282490,"name":"Ruth M. Pfeiffer","orcid":"0000-0001-7791-2698","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":282491,"name":"Eric A. Engels","orcid":"0000-0003-0203-6958","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":777120,"name":"Cameron B. Haas","orcid":"0000-0002-8211-0806","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":23,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:53:23.001995Z","pmid":"40637693","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}