Cases of pancreatic cancer among young people have risen dramatically in recent years, but scientists have been puzzled that deaths from the disease have not seen a similar increase.
Pancreatic cancer is considered one of the most deadly types of cancer. According to British statistics, less than one in 20 pancreatic cancer patients lives for a full decade after diagnosis.
Therefore, experts expected a significant increase in pancreatic cancer deaths in affected people younger than 50 years of age to match the 2 to 8 percent increase in diagnoses over the past 18 years.
But scientists now believe this did not happen because they were developing a specific type of pancreatic cancer that strikes young people, which is easier to detect and treat in its early stages.
Pancreatic cancer and other less deadly cancers
The term pancreatic cancer includes different types of tumors that affect the 25-centimetre-long organ, which helps with digestion and hormone regulation. One of these types is adenocarcinoma, which is the most common type and represents 90% of cases.
This type shows few or no symptoms until patients suddenly begin to lose weight and develop yellowing of the skin, at which point it is too late for most cases. For this reason, the disease is called the “silent killer.”
A group of experts, led by doctors from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in the US, found when analyzing the data that there was no increase in cases of adenocarcinoma among young people. The increase came from another type of pancreatic cancer, called “endocrine cancer.”
Unlike adenocarcinomas, these tumors grow slowly and take decades to appear, and although they may turn cancerous, they are often benign.
Moreover, the authors suspect that not only is cancer actually appearing increasingly among young people, but doctors now have better tools to detect it. They believe that the increasing use of sophisticated medical tests such as CT and MRI scans – which have become more sensitive over the years – better detect endocrine cancers.
These findings are often incidental, as the examination is not directed at the pancreas itself, but doctors notice the tumors while analyzing images to check for another medical problem.
“The more screenings there are, the more likely these things are to show up,” Dr. Gilbert Welch, a surgery and public health researcher at the Brigham and Public Health and an author on the study, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, told the New York Times.
Despite guidelines that small endocrine tumors should be monitored with screening rather than removed with risky surgery, some doctors argue that they are better removed in younger patients. They say that the younger patients have, the longer it takes for these tumors to turn into fatal tumors.
Requests for intervention are often driven by patients themselves, explained Dr. Adewole Adamson, an expert in overdiagnosis at the University of Texas and co-author of the new study. He said, according to the British newspaper The Daily Mail: “Many patients say, ‘Remove the tumor.’ When someone tells you that you have cancer, you feel that you must do something.”
Symptoms do not ignore
Pancreatic cancer kills about 10,000 people in the United Kingdom annually, equivalent to one death every hour in the United Kingdom.
Symptoms of pancreatic cancer include jaundice, where the whites of the eyes and skin turn yellow, along with itchy skin and dark urine. Other possible signs include loss of appetite, unintended weight loss, constipation or bloating.
Although symptoms may not be related to cancer, it is important to be checked by a doctor early as a precaution, especially if they persist for more than 4 weeks.