Early Detection
- Pancreatic cancer has a devastatingly low survival rate. By the time patients complain of significant symptoms, their cancers have typically reached advanced stages that limit treatment options.
- A new study surveyed more than 24,000 people in England with pancreatic cancer searching for additional symptoms that may be able to tip doctors off to the disease early in its development.
- Researchers found that previously unknown symptoms like thirst and dark urine often appear a year before patients are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
A study released at the National Cancer Research Institute Festival analyzed the symptoms experienced by pancreatic cancer patients with two different types of the disease. Researchers found 23 symptoms among patients who were diagnosed with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a more common form of the condition. This long list of symptoms included two that researchers said had not been reported in previous studies: thirst and dark urine. For patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms, a less common form of pancreatic cancer, researchers identified 9 symptoms.
Read MoreDr. Weiqi Liao of the University of Oxford explained the practical significance of the research: "These new findings enable us to conduct further work on understanding symptoms that could suggest pancreatic cancer. This will help (general practitioners) to make decisions about who to refer for urgent tests, especially when patients have several seemingly non-specific symptoms."
Why is pancreatic cancer so hard to treat?
Understanding Pancreatic Cancer
Dr. Anirban Maitra, of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, tells SurvivorNet that because the pancreas is inside the abdomen, "it often doesn't have symptoms that would tell you that something is wrong with your pancreas … by the time individuals walk into the clinic with symptoms like jaundice, weight loss, back pain or diabetes, it's often very late in the stage of the disease."
Dr. Matira says that about 80 percent of patients present with metastatic disease, meaning the cancer has spread beyond the pancreas into other organs like the liver “so you cannot take it out with surgeries.”
The American Cancer Society estimates that about 60,430 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021. This cancer has a five-year survival rate of about 9%. (The five-year survival rate means that people who have that cancer are, on average, about 9% as likely as people who don't have that cancer to live for at least five years after their diagnosis.) So it is vital to catch this cancer early.
Parents, siblings and children of someone with pancreatic cancer are considered at high risk for the disease because they are first-degree relatives of the individual. A study published in the American Cancer Society Journal found that just 21% of family members considered high risk for pancreatic cancer participated in surveillance.
Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center, tells SurvivorNet that pancreatic cancer could become the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States.
"Mortality is rising because it's caught so late," she says, "and we don't have enough effective medications against the cancer."
So, the question facing oncologists today is: "How can we detect this disease earlier in the process so we can have a better impact on the survival of our patients?" Maitra says. Hopefully, the results of this new study will give people a better shot at fighting pancreatic cancer.
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