The number of cases of pancreatic cancer in young adults has risen dramatically in recent years, but to the confusion of scientists, the number of deaths from the disease has not risen.
Now, a team of experts from the US may have discovered a possible reason.
Pancreatic cancer is considered one of the deadliest forms of the disease.
According to British figures, fewer than one in twenty patients with pancreatic cancer will live to see the decade after their diagnosis.
Experts therefore expect a significant increase in pancreatic deaths under the age of fifty, corresponding to the 2 to 8 percent jump in the number of diagnoses over the past 18 years.
Now experts believe that this did not happen because of the specific type of pancreatic cancer that affects young people, which is easier to recognize and treat at an earlier stage.
Pancreatic cancer is an umbrella term for several tumors found on the 10-inch tadpole-shaped organ that helps with both digestion and hormone regulation.
One type, adenocarcinoma, is the most common, accounting for 90 percent of cases.
Becki Buggs was 43 when she received a devastating pancreas diagnosis, with the nurse motivated to undergo tests after her husband noticed she looked like ‘a Minion’, which later turned out to be jaundice. Here Becki is pictured with her two children Jacob and Georgie, who were 9 and 8 years old respectively
This variant shows little to no symptoms until patients suddenly begin losing weight and turning yellow. At that point it is too late for the vast majority.
It’s why the disease is called a “silent killer.”
But experts, led by clinicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, analyzed the data and found that there was no surge in adenocarcinoma in young people.
Instead, the rise came in another type of pancreatic cancer, called endocrine cancers.
Unlike adenocarcinoma, these are slow-growing tumors that take decades to develop, and although they can become cancerous, they are usually benign.
Furthermore, the authors suspect that the cancer is not more common in young people; doctors simply have much better tools to detect the cancer.
They believe that the increased use of high-tech medical scans such as CT and MRIs – which have become more sensitive over the years – is picking up more and more endocrine cancers.
Now 45, Becki knows she is one of the lucky few whose pancreatic cancer was caught early enough to be operable. She is also part of a rising trend of younger women being diagnosed with the disease, a pattern that has experts baffled
These discoveries are often accidental, with the scan not targeting the pancreas itself, but noticed by clinicians as they analyze images while investigating another medical problem.
Dr. Gilbert Welch, a researcher in surgery and public health at Brigham and author of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicinetold The New York Times: ‘The more often you appear on screen, the more often these kinds of things will come up.’
Despite guidelines stating that small endocrine tumors should be checked with scans rather than removed with risky surgery, some doctors argue that it is better to remove them in younger patients.
They say that as younger patients have a longer lifespan, there is more time before these cancers ultimately become fatal.
As Dr. Adewole Adamson, an expert on overdiagnosis at the University of Texas and co-author of the new study, explained, these calls for action are often prompted by patients themselves.
“A lot of patients say, ‘Get it out,'” he said.
“When someone tells you you have cancer, you feel like you have to do something.”
But doctors say the success of these types of interventions for endocrine cancers has not been assessed.
Pancreatic cancer is also called a ‘silent killer’ because of its subtle symptoms that are often not noticed until too late
Some are calling for endocrine cancer to be split from the much more dangerous adenocarcinoma, so that the former is no longer classified as pancreatic cancer, in order to present the data more accurately.
One Briton affected by the devastating diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is Becki Buggs, 46, from Colchester, Essex.
The first clue that she had the disease was an offhand comment from her husband, who told her she looked like a ‘Minion’: the yellow-colored cartoon characters from the Despicable Me film series.
When the experienced nurse looked in the mirror, she saw signs of jaundice, a yellow discoloration of the skin and eyes and a serious indication that something was terribly wrong with the internal processes of the body.
The mother-of-two felt unwell on Christmas Day 2021, three days before the jaundice started, but suspected this was likely a Covid infection.
She rushed to the hospital for tests and recalled strongly suspecting it wouldn’t be good news.
‘Everything indicated that it would not be a good diagnosis. It didn’t make it any easier,” she told MailOnline.
Three days later, she received the devastating news that her fears were justified: she had pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer remains one of the least survivable forms of the disease and is increasing alarmingly. Source for data: Cancer Research UK
Fortunately for her, she was one of the lucky few where the cancer was caught at an early stage, which meant that the cancer could be operated on.
She underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy, also known as a Whipple procedure, a grueling surgery in which cancerous tissue is cut out and surgeons then rearrange the patient’s digestive system.
Ironically, Becki had prepared pancreatic patients for this procedure several times in her nursing career and described her own experience as the “hardest” ordeal of her life.
“It was the hardest 11 days of my life,” she said.
‘It’s a terrible operation. There are no two ways about it. Your entire digestive system is being completely reorganized, so it’s grueling, but for me it wasn’t that bad because I knew what to expect.”
Becki, along with cancer experts, has urged people experiencing any of the subtle signs of pancreatic cancer to seek advice from their GP.
“I worry about other patients with pancreatic cancer,” she said.
‘It scares me that there are people who will think, oh, I’m just a bit uncomfortable, but it’s fine, I won’t get a GP appointment, I’ll just ride it out.
‘Then they become so ill and jaundiced that they are admitted to the emergency room and then it is too late.
‘If you are concerned about any symptom, please contact your GP.’
Pancreatic cancer kills around 10,000 Britons every year, roughly equivalent to one death every hour in Britain.
Symptoms of pancreatic cancer include jaundice, where the whites of the eyes and skin turn yellow, in addition to itchy skin and darker urine.
Other possible symptoms include loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, constipation or bloating.
Although the symptoms are unlikely to be cancer, it is important to get them checked by a GP early to be on the safe side, especially if people have had the symptoms for more than four weeks.