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There's not that is known about the risk factors for development of pancreas cancer.
However there are a few things that have been shown to increase the risks in studies
that have been done in the past to evaluate this question.
Smoking is certainly one risk factor
that has been clearly identified. So smokers have a higher risk of development for this type of cancer.
Anything that causes chronic
inflammation of the pancreas can lead to a slightly increased risk of pancreas cancer.
So people who have things like pancreatitis
,for different reasons, may have an increased risk.
There are also some
rare families that seem to have
multiple family members with development of pancreas cancer
that seem to have a specific genetic mutation ,but those are a very small number of the overall
portion of patients with pancreas cancer and so
we don't think that gene testing is something that is going to be very helpful for the
majority of patients since the majority of people will not
a family history pancreas cancer.
We do you know there's some slightly increased risk
if you're overweight or if you are less active. When they look at large studies
to examine lifestyle factors and things like that
Having an overall less healthy lifestyle does slightly increase the risk of pancreas cancer.
Most people are diagnosed with pancreas cancer when they develop certain symptoms
that would take them to their doctor's office and lead to some testing in the majority of cases.
and I'll talk about what those symptoms are in a second. Sometimes people may be getting
an evaluation done for some other problem
or in some cases a CT scan done
to look for kidney stones or something like that
and something abnormal will be seen on the pancreas, but the majority of people come to
their doctor's office because they're having symptoms, and the symptoms, unfortunately, can be very vague
and very common symptoms like
abdominal pain or sometimes back pain can be the first symptom of something going on
with the pancreas
Sometimes patients can develop weight loss that they can't really explain.
Sometimes people will develop jaundice which is the yellowing of the skin
or the whites of the eyes.
and they may not have any other symptoms but they go to their doctor and get some blood work done their doctor and get some blood work
and that evaluation may lead to an abnormality in the pancreas.
Some don't really have a lot of symptoms
for very long before this cancer is found.
Unfortunately, pancreas cancer is the type of cancer that,like I said, may not have a lot of symptoms
leading up to it, so patients may have it present in their body
for a while before it gets diagnosed
and so
the majority of patients who are diagnosed with pancreas cancer
at the time of the diagnosis it is already spread to other parts of the body
predominately things like the liver, lymph nodes in the abdomen are places it often goes
in those cases, the majority of treatments are chemotherapy treatments
surgery is not something that we typically uses once it's gone to other parts
the body
and so
people who treat a lot of pancreas cancer patients,
really have a lot of emphasis on trying to develop better chemotherapy
treatments or other sort of systemic, whole body treatments
to try to
killers cancer cells and help improve
how our patients do over time.
So, research is very important
and we have a very active
clinical trial program here at Vanderbilt
trying to develop new strategies, new types of therapies to try to better treat this disease.