The present situation of early diagnosis for pancreatic cancer

Abstract

Recently, cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed in the early stages have been reported. The aim of this study was to collect and analyze the clinical data of patients diagnosed with stage 0 or 1 ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. The clinical data of 159 patients, including 88 males and 71 females were collected. The mean age was 68.5 years and there were 40 patients with stage 0 and 119 patients with stage 1 pancreatic cancer. The proportion of stage 0 and 1 to total cases of pancreatic cancer was ~2%. Of note, the proportion of stage 0 to total pancreatic cancer was only ~0.6%. Only ~20% of the patients with early stage pancreatic cancer had symptoms. Indirect imaging findings such as dilatation of MPD are important in the detection of early stage pancreatic cancer. Particularly, focal fatty changes may be specific imaging findings of early stage pancreatic cancer. Early stage pancreatic cancer has a good prognosis, but recurrence in the remnant pancreas is not rare, thus, careful follow up is very important. An efficient strategy to detect and follow-up early stage pancreatic cancer should be created based on these data.