Donating to Pancreatic Cancer Research Can Improve Patient Outcomes

Posted by Hollie Williams on July 18th, 2019

Pancreatic cancer has a low profile and is considered deadly due to its slow progression, lack of screening tests, and cure. There are no specific screening tools to help identify pancreatic cancer early. About thirty percent of pancreatic cancer can still go undetected after surgery, leaving an open possibility of recurrence five years after the surgery.

Pancreatic cancer prognosis has not improved for a long time. The symptoms of pancreatic cancer manifest at an advanced stage, limiting the patients’ treatment options. Many research centers focus on improving patient survivability by developing tools with high sensitivity for early identification of the disease. More funding is needed to boost the research efforts aimed at finding better screening and treatment options for pancreatic cancer.

Here is how donations can improve the lives of pancreatic cancer patients:

• Not many survivors of pancreatic cancer are available to create awareness campaigns because they die within a short period after diagnosis. Retaining pancreatic cancer patients for clinical trials and further research is even more difficult because the disease metastasizes at very high speeds. Donating to pancreatic cancer can help to discover and improve the detection mechanisms and survival rates and help patients live longer.

• Since pancreatic cancer does not behave the same way as other cancers, the treatment approaches used on different types of cancer do not work well on its tumors. That is why it is considered as rapidly lethal. There is a need for additional funding to find better and precise treatments for curing the disease.

• There is no clear-cut staging system for pancreatic cancer. Even when caught early, the disease still requires a complicated surgery known as the Whipple procedure. After surgery, the 10-year survival rate remains less than 10%. The disease will continue to metastasize because early tumors will have already progressed to other organs. The cells get into the bloodstream and find ways to survive in different organs of the body at a microscopic level. Advanced research into ways of stopping pancreatic cancer before it progresses is required and funding as well.

More techniques are needed to help target specific aspects of pancreatic tumor cells to make them receptive to therapies used in other cancers.The above challenges call for a dire need for additional resources to help make quick and meaningful progress that will enhance outcomes in patients.

About Author

The Sandler-Kenner Foundation was started by Gregory A. Echt, M.D. and his wife, Susan T. Echt, after they lost two of their dear friends, Michael and Peter, to premature deaths from pancreatic cancer.