Why Is Pancreatic Cancer Becoming More Common In Young Women

Dr. Srinivas Gaddam has been disturbed by anything he saw in his work to pancreatic cancer sick people.

“There are some patients that you can’t stop thinking about because they’ve left a mark on you, and you try your best to turn things around, but there’s only so much you can do,” Gaddam said, adding that he had cared for a few extremely young children.

Why Is Pancreatic Cancer Becoming More Common In Young Women

Gaddam & other scientists found that the proportion of patients treated by pancreatic, dubbed as “silent killer” since it is hard to identify in its initial stages, has been rising both for males and females over the last 2 decades.

“We knew that there was a trend [of younger patients] in colon cancer, but we didn’t know about pancreas cancer. So, I decided to see if there was a real trend.

Why Is Pancreatic Cancer Becoming More Common In Young Women

Was it just that I happened to see those few young patients disproportionate to everybody else in the field,” said Gaddam, who is an assistant professor of medicine in the Karsh Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It turns out to be true.”

If present trends persist, pancreatic cancer in females ages 15 to 34 will be 400 percent higher than in males of a similar-aged group by 2040, according to studies. Even more startling, despite the limited sample size, they discovered that the condition is disproportion expanding amongst young females those below the age of 55, and notably with other females ages 15 through 34. Males have historically had a higher incidence of pancreatic.

The team of specialists has found some samples with the help of which they have studied some of the factors considered responsible for this increasing trend of pancreatic cancer among women. Though it is not that easy yet, more research is still on to have a better understanding of the same and, if possible, find a way that can help control this menace among females, stated an expert from the research team.

“We do have a well-defined, but a small, group of high-risk patients. For those, we tend to screen annually. We tend to do MRI, CT scans, and endoscopic ultrasounds,” Gaddam explained. “These are different modalities of testing on these patients to detect cancer, but for the vast majority of the general population, really not too many things to go by.”

Scientists used the Surveillance Epidemiology & End Results (SEER) database, which gathers information from the disease registry that represents 37 percent of the US population, to analyze pancreatic carcinoma recurrence estimates per 100,000 persons from 2000 to 2018. During that time, they discovered 283,817 situations in both males and females.

“The actual number of people that are successfully able to get surgery is even smaller, which is why the outcomes from pancreatic cancer remain poor,” Nagpal said. “It would be great if we could identify patients at an earlier stage because that would mean patients would qualify for surgery, and we could improve outcomes in these patients.”

Further study using bigger datasets, including hospital-based outpatient cancer information, could verify these findings & offer insight into why this is occurring, according to Nagpal.

“I think this shows a potentially alarming trend, and we need to put, as a society, more investment into this area to stem this rise,” Gaddam said. “I think it calls for more research, more research dollars, more women should be speaking out for research in this area. And I’d say if there’s anybody out there, that’s worried about pancreas cancer in their family, or if they see a trend, they should talk to their doctor about it.”

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