Cancer of Unknown Primary cause: x3 increase in 3 years

Source: Clalit Health Fund (4.8M members)

Hebrew version גירסה עברית

* See below for clarifications originally attached to the data

Background

The data was obtained from Clalit Health Fund (4.8 million members as of 2022) via Freedom Of Information Act request. It includes a list of 31 cancer types and yearly no. of new cases (2019-2022). See below for the complete data set.

The request was sent by attorney Ori Shabi, and included an additional question regarding number of cases vaccinated against Covid-19 prior to the cancer diagnosis. The question was ignored and the received data did not include vaccination status.

Discussion

The most apparent signal in the data is the considerable increase (3.11 times) in cancer cases of unknown primary cause (CUP) along the years 2019-2022. Below are two basic graphs representing the whole data set. In general, other types of cancer did not exhibit such significant trends:

Cancer of Unknown Primary cause (CUP) is a diagnosis used when it is not possible to identify the type of cancer cells that were found.

Therefore, CUP is diagnosed if:

a. The disease is discovered in an advanced state (advanced cancer) and is already spread to several organs (metastatic), and

b. The properties of the cells and the tissue do not fit other categories.

There are very few specific symptoms; Most symptoms are common to other diseases (pain, change in bowl habits, cough, fever etc.) Once diagnosed, chemotherapy is the most common treatment. The prognosis of CUP can vary widely. The average survival time ranges from several months to a year after diagnosis.

COVID-19 is ruled out as a possible cause since, despite the extensive worldwide research of the disease, there is no clear evidence that it can cause cancer or increase the risk of developing cancer.

Advanced cancer due to delayed diagnosis could explain the increase in CUP cases during 2020, caused by the lockdowns in early-mid 2020, but this gap would have been bridged by the end of 2020, which still leaves the drastic rise in 2021-2022 unexplained.

We turned to the Israel Cancer Association asking if they were aware of the rise in CUP. Their response was that the National Cancer Registry is the reliable source for such data, but they have not yet published data for 2021-2022.

Limitations

The available data has several limitations, among them:

• Short term, low resolution yearly data grouped by general cancer types

• No diagnosis codes (ICD-9) were supplied

• The official, reliable tracking of cancer cases in Israel is handled by the National Cancer Registry. Unfortunately, it usually takes two years for the registry to be updated. Currently it contains data until 2020.

Conclusion

It is essential to further validate the data and investigate the drastic, unexplained rise in cancer cases of unknown primary cause (CUP).

Addendum

An oncologist remarked that it could be just a diagnosis that doctors gave in an early stage, in order to approve an expensive battery of tests for their patients.

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Clarifications given by Clalit health fund (translated)

Subject: Your request under FOIA - cancer cases

As per your request, the file with the data is attached.

Note that the data is raw. Any attempt to associate cancer occurrence with vaccination status based on this data is not possible and requires full, organized research in accepted methodology which will enable isolation of the vaccination parameter from many other parameters that could influence the occurrence of cancer, including bias due to vaccination of specific populations, existence of comorbidities etc.
Without conducting such full, organized research, no conclusion can be drawn from the attached findings.

Additionally, there is no evidence in existing medical literature of a relationship between Covid-19 vaccines and cancer.

Regards,
Noa Danai
Manager, Knowledge & Information Management Division
Clalit Freedom of Information Act Trustee

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Complete data set (translated)

Israel Clalit Cancer Cases 2019 2022

48.5KB ∙ PDF file

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