Mortality for lip and oral cavity cancers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Since it is still undetermined as to whether all these aspects may have influenced the death rate for lip and oral cavity cancers during the COVID-19 pandemic, we performed an electronic search using the latest version of the online CDC Wonder database, which reports the underlying causes of death between the years 2018 and 2022 in the US (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics 2024), using the “ICD-10” codes for malignant cancers of lip and oral cavity (ICD-10 codes from C00.0 to C06.9). We observed a progressive increase of the age-adjusted death rate ×100,000 for lip and oral cavity cancers in the US, from 0.307 in 2018, 0.317 in 2019, 0.315 in 2020, 0.360 in 2021, and up to 0.361 in 2022, respectively. This incremental trend was found to be statistically significant by ANOVA (p < 0.001). As concerns the direct comparison of the death rate for lip and oral cavity cancers between 2018 and 2022, significant differences were found for 2021 versus 2018 (p < 0.001), 2019 (p = 0.006), and 2020 (p = 0.004), as well as between 2022 and 2018 (p < 0.001), 2019 (p = 0.004), and 2020 (p = 0.002). No other comparisons reached statistical significance (all p > 0.05). Taken together, the results of this analysis of recent US mortality rates for lip and oral cavity cancers suggest that the age-adjusted death rate for these malignancies has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.