Why does it take months to get a cancer diagnosis?

In 10 seconds? Recent US data show that patients commonly experience months-long delays in cancer diagnosis after seeking medical care for worrisome symptoms. Work to minimize these delays is essential to improve outcomes for cancer patients.

What’s the story? When thinking of ways to improve health outcomes for cancer patients, it's common to focus on the development of new cancer treatments. But drug discovery is only one of many ways to help improve their well-being. To that point, there's still so much work to be done to realize the full benefit of treatments that already exist. And one area of focus involves optimizing the ways that cancer is diagnosed so that patients can start treatment sooner, which is crucial for treatment success.