Patient delay in oral cancer in North-Western Spain: Where do we stand?
Helena Sánchez Ortega, Pablo Varela Centelles, Juan Seoane, José Luis López-Cedrún, Arturo Bilbao Alonso, Lucía García Caballero, Andrés Blanco Hortas, Juan M. Seoane-Romero · 2026
Read Patient delay in oral cancer in North-Western Spain: Where do we stand? by Helena Sánchez Ortega, Pablo Varela Centelles, Juan Seoane, José Luis López-Cedrún, Arturo Bilbao Alonso, Lucía García Caballero, Andrés Blanco Hortas, Juan M. Seoane-Romero (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13629897.txt.
Description
Helena Sánchez Ortega and co-authors measure where time goes when someone develops mouth cancer in north-western Spain. Late diagnosis is common in this disease, and patients are often blamed for waiting. The team timed every step from first symptom to treatment start for cases diagnosed in 2025 and compared them with a matched group from 2015.
The patient's own wait shrank a little, from a median of about 31 days to 25. Early steps in primary care and diagnosis also sped up. But specialist and pre-treatment steps grew longer, so the total time to treatment did not change. The patient share of the whole path stayed small in both eras. The authors say the delay has moved downstream, and fixing it means system-level work on specialist review and treatment starts.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Helena Sánchez Ortega, Pablo Varela Centelles, Juan Seoane, José Luis López-Cedrún, Arturo Bilbao Alonso, Lucía García Caballero, Andrés Blanco Hortas, Juan M. Seoane-Romero |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 20 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |