Jeopardy Host Alex Trebek Has Pancreatic Cancer– The Options For Treatment

Still, pancreatic cancer is a very difficult diagnosis. “It is true that it’s still the minority of patients that are cured with pancreas cancer, and certainly if it’s already metastatic, our options are limited,” says Dr. Labow.

“The treatment options for pancreatic cancer include chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, clinical trials,” says Dr. Allyson Ocean, Medical Oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“The pancreas in our body has two functions,” says Dr. Ocean. “It secretes enzymes that help us digest our food and it also secretes insulin which helps us manage sugar in our body. So that’s why diabetes sometimes can happen as a symptom because the cancer is growing in the pancreas, affecting the insulin, and patients get diabetic, and this is because a cancer is developing. And then, unfortunately the cancer is diagnosed very late because it’s been growing slowly inside, silently, in the person.”

The greatest difficulty with pancreatic cancer is the solid tumors. “It is the solid tumor cancer that has the worst prognosis. It is right now the third leading cause of cancer death, soon to be the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States,” says Dr. Ocean. “Mortality is rising because it is caught so late and we don’t have enough effective medications against the cancer.”

“The cancer cells are surrounded by what is called a stroma, and the stroma serves as a barrier for medications to get in to the cancer to kill it,” says Dr. Ocean. Stroma is tissue that surrounds the cancer tumor. “So chemotherapies have a hard time getting in, radiation has a hard time penetrating. Think of pancreatic cancer as an oatmeal raisin cookie and the raisins are actually the cancer cells, and the cookie part is actually all the stroma around it. And imagine having to navigate through all that stroma for a treatment to be able to get into a cell to kill it. So that’s why the treatments just really aren’t good enough to penetrate the cancer. But we’re improving, we’re getting better treatments.”

There has also been a lot of progress in surgery for pancreatic cancer. “One of the things that we now understand is the anatomy of the pancreas and how we can treat it surgically. An operation that used to take eight or ten hours, and people would be in the hospital for two to three weeks, now we can do even robotically or minimally invasively,” says Dr. Labow.

“Or even if we don’t do it like that, patients leave the hospital in five to six days, and can recover and have totally normal lives, based on techniques, the understanding how we need to approach the patient,” says Dr. Labow. “So having pancreas surgery doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have any limitations on what you can eat or drink.”

It’s even possible to get back to a normal life post surgery. “It doesn’t make you diabetic automatically, since the pancreas is also involved in that, and people can lead completelive completely normal lives,” says Dr. Labow.

But surgery isn’t a replacement for chemotherapy. “Of course everyone who has pancreas cancer does go on to get chemotherapy, even if it’s relatively early, because it’s so aggressive. And therefore that can affect your recovery after surgery when getting chemotherapy, but certainly, um, patients can be cured with this as well,” he says.

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