• Ali Motlagh, Maisa Yamrali, Samira Azghandi, Payam Azadeh, Mohammad Vaezi, Farzaneh Ashrafi, Kazem Zendehdel, Hamidreza Mirzaei, Ali Basi, Afshin Rakhsha, Sharareh Seifi, Morteza Tabatabaeefar, Ahmad Elahi, Pouneh Pirjani, Leila Moadab Shoar, Faranak Nadarkhani, Mostafa Khoshabi, Massih Bahar, Fatemeh Esfahani, Hossein Fudazi, Farhad Samiei, Borna Farazmand, Azin Ahmari, Mojtaba Vand Rajabpour, Ghasem Janbabaei, Alireza Raisi, Afshin Ostovar, and Reza Malekzadeh.
• National Cancer Control Secretariat, Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Tehran, Iran.
• Arch Iran Med. 2020 Apr 1; 23 (4): 255-264.

AbstractOn March 11th 2020, the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic by the WHO. One of the groups that is considered high risk in this pandemic are cancer patients as they are treated with a variety of immune system suppressor treatment modalities and this puts them in a great risk for infectious disease (including COVID-19). Therefore, cancer patients require higher level measures for preventing and treating infectious diseases. furthermore, cancer patients may bear additional risk due to the restriction of access to the routine diagnostic and therapeutic services during such epidemic. Since most of the attention of health systems is towards patients affected with COVID-19, the need for structured and unified approaches to COVID-19 prevention and care specific to cancer patients and cancer centers is felt more than ever. This article provides the recommendations and possible actions that should be considered by patients, their caregivers and families, physician, nurses, managers and staff of medical centers involved in cancer diagnosis and treatment. We pursued two major goals in our recommendations: first, limiting the exposure of cancer patients to medical environments and second, modifying the treatment modalities in a manner that reduces the probability of myelosuppression such as delaying elective diagnostic and therapeutic services, shortening the treatment course, or prolonging the interval between treatment courses.© 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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