Epidemiological Analysis on the Impact of Early COVID-19 Pandemic on Mortality for Hepatocellular Carcinoma in the United States

It is not clear if disruption of diagnostic and care pathways for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may have translated into a higher mortality for this type of cancer in the United States during the first period of the pandemic. To this end, we have planned this epidemiological analysis on the CDC WONDER online database to address this important dilemma. The mortality for HCC in the United States throughout the study period remained almost unvaried, with just minor variations between the peak in 2018 (2.84 × 100,000) and troughs in 2019 and 2022 (2.78 × 100,000). Accordingly, both the mortality trend throughout 2018–2022 (f = 0.779; P = 0.538) and the multiple comparisons across different years (all P > 0.60) did not reach statistical significance by one-way analysis of variance and the Tukey post hoc test, respectively.