American cancer patients are facing longer surgery wait times today than over the past few decades - with dangerous consequences.

Wait times have increased from weeks to over a month for six types of common cancer, a new study of more than 2.7 million patients found.

Those cancers include breast, colon, lung, pancreatic, gastric and esophageal cancer, medical researchers said this week. The patients had stage 1 to 3 cancers - the only stages considered eligible for surgery at diagnosis.

“What was striking was the consistency,” Tim Donahue, the senior author on the study and a surgical oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told STAT. “Across every cancer we studied, patients are waiting longer today than they were a decade ago.”

For people with breast cancer, wait times increase from 34 days to 45 days, gastric cancer waits rose from 35 to 49 days and those with colon cancer waited for between 20 to 31 days.

Where patients were treated and other factors dictated whether or not they were impacted by longer wait times. For example, the biggest waits were seen at large academic health centers, but Black Americans, people who were uninsured or on Medicare and patients who sought out treatment in America’s West were disproportionately affected.

The study’s authors also suggest there are multiple reasons for these delays.

Staffing challenges and limited resources within the facilities are one. So is an increasing number of referrals from urgent care facilities and the increasing complexity of modern cancer care, including robotic surgeries.

Notably, the study included surgeries conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic - using records from the National Cancer Database from 2012-2023 - when some cancer surgeries were pushed back.

But the researchers said they also saw the “noticeable increase” in waiting times post-Covid.

These findings are concerning because longer wait times can raise the risk of disease spread and premature death, according to experts.

Every month delayed in cancer treatment can raise the risk of death by around 10 percent, a past study from U.K. and Canada researchers showed. For every 30-day delay from the time of diagnosis, the risk of death increased by 4.6 percent, another study from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center determined.

“Many things are completely out of the medical team’s control when caring for patients with head and neck cancer, but time to surgery is something we can immediately modify,” head and neck cancer surgeon Dr. Stephen Kang said in a statement alongside the study’s findings.

An estimated 626,140 people in the United States will die from cancer in 2026, according to the American Cancer Society. There will be over 2.1 million new cases.