One day you're feeling fine, then, at a moment's notice... your world is turned upside down.

               With a 4% survival rate (after 5 years), Pancreatic Cancer has definitely earned its reputation of being a “bad luck” cancer. Bad luck in the fact that not only have you learned you have cancer, you have the most deadly cancer there is (second to liver cancer boasting a 7% survival rate after 5 years) meaning the odds are most definitely not in your favor.

               The reason pancreatic cancer is the most deadly has everything to do with the fact that it generates no real symptoms until it is essentially too late to do anything about it. The main symptoms include things that many of us feel on an almost daily basis which does not lead to any alarm. With such mild symptoms as upper abdominal pain (possibly radiating to the back), loss of appetite, weight loss (not dramatic until late stage) and depression, it’s feasible that someone may feel they are overexerting themselves and need to either relax, take some Aleve or try and power through it to feel better. Certainly these symptoms don’t bring cancer to mind. It’s often not until jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes due to excess levels of liver waste products) sets in that the person will actually go to the doctor. By that time the cancer/ tumor has overtaken too much of the tissue rendering it inoperable or unresectable (meaning there is no way to cut the tumor out or even cut it back).

               The most common form of pancreatic cancer (>75% of cases) is caused by “adenocarcinoma” which is a fancy term meaning the cancer started with a glandular cell. Glandular means it can begin in any gland (an organ that secretes substance(s) for use in or outside the body (such as sweat, saliva, milk and hormones)). There are risk factors for this cancer, as with anything, including smoking (obviously- smoking = everything bad could happen), obesity, adult onset diabetes and workplace exposure. Alcohol abuse may be directly related to pancreatic cancer related to the damaging effects on the liver. Those risk factors are the ones we have control over. The factors we cannot change include age (average diagnosis age is 71), gender (more common in men than women), family history of the disease/ genetics (it seems to run in the family) and those with chronic pancreatitis.

               Preexisting chronic conditions, such as pancreatitis, make it especially difficult to diagnose pancreatic cancer early on. The lab tests and imaging (X-ray, Cat Scan etc) may seem abnormal related to those conditions and the diagnostician may not look much past that. Additionally the early testing for pancreatic cancer can be terribly inaccurate or very expensive (an MRI can run around $3000.00 if not covered by insurance and a biopsy would cost about $2000.00 if uncovered; insurance companies often will not cover something they deem unnecessary and without many other preliminary tests leading to the diagnosis most insurance companies will not ok such extravagant testing).

               Promisingly, back in 2012, a young boy named Jack Andraka may have discovered a way to detect pancreatic cancer very early.  Please, link to the story and read more about it (it's much more in depth than I can explain myself).