Impact of COVID-19 on Cancer-Related Care in the United States: An Overview

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments

=============

Thank you for letting me peer-review your work! This paper is an interesting review article of the covid-19 pandemic’s impact on cancer care in the United States.

Specific comments

=============

Major comments

---------------------

1. Please clarify the type of review that was conducted for the paper. There are different types of reviews, such as narrative reviews and systematic reviews. If the paper is a systematic review, the authors provide more information on how the review was conducted, including how articles were selected and reviewed.

2.  Please explain that some of the articles referenced in the paper (articles' number 18 and 25) are from outside the United States, but the titles of these articles are mentioned in the context of the United States. Additionally, the type of vaccine mentioned in one of the articles (article number 25) is different from the type of vaccine used in the United States. Therefore, please clarify these differences and explain how they are relevant to the review.

3. Please clarify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on underlying comorbidities related to cancer care (lines 118-128). Please explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the care of cancer patients with comorbidities.

4. Please discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic is different from other pandemics, such as influenza. 

5. Please add a conclusion section to the paper. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1- In this short review, the authors discussed the management of cancer patients and vaccination in cancer patients during the COVID-19 period. In the introduction part of the article, there should be one or two paragraphs focused on the epidemiological features of the COVID-19 infection. For this purpose, I suggest you use the following two studies:

Sahin TT, Akbulut S, Yilmaz S. COVID-19 pandemic: Its impact on liver disease and liver transplantation. World J Gastroenterol. 2020;26(22):2987-2999.

Başkıran A, Akbulut S, Şahin TT, Tunçer A, Kaplan K, Bayındır Y, Yılmaz S. Coronavirus Precautions: Experience of High Volume Liver Transplant Institute. Turk J Gastroenterol. 2022;33(2):145-152. 

2- As it is known, there was a serious decrease in the rate of admission to elective and emergency services during the pandemic period. While this situation caused serious complications in emergency patients, it caused important problems such as delay and stage skipping in cancer patients. The data on how survival is affected in the long term, especially in cancer patients, will become more apparent in the coming years. For the COVID-19 and cancer relationship section, I suggest you use the following studies:

Akbulut S, Garzali IU, Hargura AS, Aloun A, Yilmaz S. Screening, Surveillance, and Management of Hepatocellular Carcinoma During the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Narrative Review. J Gastrointest Cancer. 2022 May 2:1-12.

Akbulut S, Sahin TT, Ince V, Yilmaz S. Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on clinicopathological features of transplant recipients with hepatocellular carcinoma: A case-control study. World J Clin Cases. 2022;10(15):4785-4798.

Akbulut S, Hargura AS, Garzali IU, Aloun A, Colak C. Clinical presentation, management, screening and surveillance for colorectal cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic. World J Clin Cases. 2022 Sep 16;10(26):9228-9240.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx