Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month

Today is the first day of Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. I did not know about it until my mother was diagnosed with it in 1992 and died 43 days later. She was a fit woman at 72 years of age, who had recently retired. This was a shock to us all.



New research suggests that pancreatic cancer growth rate may allow time for early detection, which was unheard of in 1992.

"It has been well established that a huge hurdle in treating pancreatic cancer patients is the late timing of diagnosis. For the vast majority of patients, diagnosis takes place when surgical resection is no longer an option, and often these patients already have metastatic disease, or tumor cells that have spread elsewhere in the body." (This was true for my mother.)

"By studying the genetic changes and analyzing the growth rate of the cells, Dr. Iacobuzio-Donahue and colleagues were also able to establish, for the first time, a timeline during which the tumor forms and progresses. These processes occur over an extended period of time, suggesting that pancreatic cancer does not immediately grow rapidly or aggressively."

There's hope, totally unexpected from my limited perspective.