Hello everyone, my name is Thuy Linh Suong and I'd like to give a presentation on our study entitled Assessment of the Fear of COVID-19 and its Impact on Lung Cancer Screening Participation among the Korean general population. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the decline in cancer screening has been widely documented in many countries. The fear of contracting virus has been suggested in several reports to explain this disruption in cancer secondary prevention and play as an additional barrier to health services that should be adequately considered. However, no study has yet been done to assess the fear of COVID-19 in target screening populations and how much it influences their screening behaviors during the pandemic. Therefore, our study was conducted aiming to assess the fear of COVID-19 in comparison with that of lung cancer among the general Korean population, as hypothesized that people tended to weight the fear of a relevant disease compared with that of coronavirus infection, affecting their decisions to undergo or postpone screening. Also, we wanted to examine its association with people's behaviors towards health screening, addressing how much COVID-19 affects population to participate in lung cancer screening. The data was taken from the Korean National Cancer Screening Survey in 2020. This was a population-based cross-sectional survey using a structural questionnaire. We extracted data on 3,557 cancer-free respondents aged from 40 years. The outcome variable was defined whether respondents have participated in health checkups during the COVID-19 pandemic with or without schedule. Our exposure of interest here was degree of fear regarding COVID-19 compared with lung cancer. Other confounding factors included social demographic characteristics, attitudes toward participating in screening, self-perceived general health status, family history of cancer, and co-morbidity. Descriptive analysis included chi-square and Spearman-Lange tests. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were applied to identify factors associated with health checkups participation. In summary of results, we found almost 30% of respondents perceived more fear of COVID-19 than lung cancer. And these figures here show that the trend in health checkup non-participation across 11 levels of the fear of coronavirus in comparison with lung cancer. The pattern in the race of non-participation overall was not apparent. However, we observed a significant increase in the percentage of those had checkup schedule but did not participate when the fear of COVID-19 increased and exceeds that of lung cancer. For the multivariate logistic regression analysis, respondents with more fear of COVID-19 compared with lung cancer showed significant decreased likelihood of attendance in health checkups. We also did additional exploratory analysis on eligible population for lung cancer screening and found in a total of 210 eligible individuals, the excess fear of COVID-19 over lung cancer was present in around 21% of them, which was 45 people versus 30% in the general public. And among these 45 people, only around 15% participated in health checkup, whereas in the general public, this figure was around 30%. In summary, our study found nearly 30% of survey respondents perceived more fear of COVID-19 than lung cancer, while this excess fear toward COVID-19 significantly hampered their engagement in disease screening. This finding suggests the negative impact of excess fear of COVID-19 on disease screening. Particularly, we're worried about lung cancer screening, so there's a need for providing appropriate information to the target population of lung cancer screening to minimize disruption in cancer prevention activities.

Fear of COVID-19

Lung cancer screening

Korean general population

Health checkups

Disease screening