Pancreas cancer
The incidence of pancreatic cancer has been estimated at 10 cases per 100,000 population, the average age of clinical presentation is 69 years, with a slight preponderance in males (ratio 1.2-1.5 to 1 for females ).
Overall survival at 1 year of diagnosis is made very low (12%) and even survival at 5 years (0,4-4%), the lowest of all cancers.
Early symptoms of pancreatic cancer are usually nonspecific and are therefore often ignored by the patient and physician. Among these early nonspecific symptoms include: bloating, malaise, diarrhea, vomiting and constipation.
As the disease progresses and is already at an advanced stage the patient presents to the doctor with a painless jaundice and a history of weight loss.
The prevalence of symptoms varies according to location (head, body or tail of the pancreas) and size of the tumor growing within the pancreatic mass.
When the presence of jaundice is associated with a tumor that sits in the body or tail of the pancreas invariably coincides with a clinical presentation very late, which makes the chances of being able to remove the tumor are minimal due to the almost certain existence metastases in the liver and regional lymph nodes.
Surgical removal of the tumor and the organ that sits (whether partial or total) is the treatment that offers the greatest chance of cure, although more than 80% of patients present the physician in an evolutionary phase in which the cancerous disease is already well advanced or unresectable, which explains the very low percentage of cases in which it is possible to remove the tumor, ie the tumor is “unresectable” and, consequently, the disappointing survival rates of this malignancy.
The key to increasing the percentages of cases in which possible removal of the tumor and part of the body where it settles (pancreatoduodenectomy) or the entire pancreas (total pancreatectomy radical) lies therefore in an early diagnosis.
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