By Ike Swetlitz

Doctors are detecting cancers at later and more dangerous stages after the pandemic delayed standard screenings that pick up the disease in its most treatable forms, the president of Boston’s top oncology center said.

“There was a decrease of about 90% of screening, whether it was pap smear, mammogram, colonoscopy,” which can pick up cervical, breast and colon cancer, said Laurie Glimcher, chief executive officer of the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “We’re still not back up to the usual.”

Patients shied away from hospitals and clinics that were inundated with Covid-19 patients at the height of the pandemic. Nearly two years ago, National Cancer Institute Director Norman Sharpless estimated that the U.S. would see 10,000 more deaths from breast and colorectal cancer over the next 10 years as a result.

“A lot of people are still very reluctant to come in,” Glimcher said in an interview in Boston.

Dana-Farber doctors are working to find ways to diagnose more people in the early stages of cancer, when many can still be cured, she said. Some tumors, such as in the ovaries, can be silent and relatively symptom-free until they become difficult to treat, she said.