The increase in excess mortality was seen in all Nordic countries except Iceland, with the largest site‑specific survival drops observed in liver cancer among Finnish and Swedish men, where 1‑year relative survival fell by around 7–10 percentage points.​

For oncology developers and health‑economics teams, these data quantify how system shocks and diagnostic delays during the pandemic translated into real outcome losses, which is crucial for interpreting trial recruitment patterns and real‑world evidence from the COVID‑19 period. The findings also support investment cases for earlier diagnosis, screening and pathway‑optimisation tools in the Nordics, particularly for aggressive cancers where short‑term survival proved most vulnerable

link to the article in int j cancer

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