Pancreatic Cancer: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment
About Pancreatic Cancer
As the name suggests, pancreatic cancer is the type of cancer wherein malignant cancer cells form and spread rapidly in the tissues in the pancreas, inside the human body.
It is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer among the list of other forms of cancer, since the disease is remotely likely to be detected at an early stage, leaving only little room for proper diagnosis and treatment, since most of the times the doctors are able to detect it when it already reaches an advanced stage.
Most of the pancreatic cancers start from its in-house exocrine cells that are known to produce digestive juices in the stomach, while the other endocrine cells produce hormones.
While causes of pancreatic cancer aren’t substantially established yet, there are certain risk factors that may come to play, increasing the chance of one developing pancreatic cancer.
These risk factors include chronic pancreatitis, history of pancreatic cancer in the family, someone suffering from long-standing diabetes, someone who smokes frequently and have inherited pancreatic complications from the genes in the family, are at a higher chance of developing pancreatic cancer.
Coming to the symptoms of this form of cancer, the majority of the patients face issues like jaundice, tremendous and unexplained weight loss, acute pain in the upper and middle abdomen, along with backache, depression issues, and also facing fatigue a little too often, and loss of appetite.
Some of the ways to diagnose pancreatic cancer are through CT scans, endoscopic ultrasound, MRI, biopsy, percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography, laparoscopy, or endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography.
Based on diagnosis and determination of the stage and type of pancreatic cancer that the patient is suffering from, the doctor allots treatment, which can either be surgery, wherein the cancerous tumors are removed by conducting an operation, or radiations therapy, wherein the cancer cells are killed with the help of powerful radiations, and chemotherapy, that can be used combined or solo.
The rate of survival after diagnosis hasn’t been too impressive, however, since only 23% of patients manage to live one year after being diagnosed with an exocrine type of pancreatic cancer, while on 4% are continuing to live after five years of the diagnosis.