Barriers and Facilitators Associated with Delays in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Gastric Cancer: a Systematic Review

Background: The present study was conducted to identify barriers and facilitators of early diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer.

Methods: Comprehensive search was conducted on 2021 in various databases, including Medline, Web of science, and Scopus. Keywords such as gastric cancer, screening programs, endoscopy, barriers, facilitators, and factor were used for the search, as single or in combination. Also a manual search was done in valid scientific journals to find related full-text articles. The search results were entered into the Endonote-X8 software, which automatically removes duplicate articles. Then, the title and the abstract and finally, the text of the articles were studied. Articles that addressed barriers and facilitators of early diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer were included.

Results: In according to the results of 22 included articles, delay time in the diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer were high, and factors such as age, sex, race and ethnicity, economic and social status, access to diagnostic services, implementation of screening programs, type and accuracy of screening methods, use of insurance services, error in care services, and presence of gastrointestinal symptoms were considered to be contributing factors in this regard.

Conclusions: It seems that to reduce delay in the diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer, factors such as implementing screening programs using acceptable methods with high sensitivity and accuracy with a high level of participation, increasing insurance coverage and reducing the share of people in payments, increasing people's access to diagnostic services, educating people about the symptoms and risks of gastric cancer, undertaking proper follow-up in patients and suspects cases identified in screening, as well as increasing patients' access to medical services through financial and insurance support are significantly important.