Screening

- Tests and exams used to find a disease, such as cancer, in people who do not have any symptoms



Early detection

- Using an approach that lets pancreatic cancer get diagnosed earlier than otherwise might have occurred.

- One reason for the often poor outlook for people with pancreatic cancer is that very few of these cancers are found early.


- The pancreas is located deep inside the body, so early tumors cannot be seen or felt by health care providers during routine physical exams.


- Patients usually have no symptoms until the cancer has spread to other organs.

-Right now, there are no blood tests to find early cancers of the pancreas.

-Doctors are looking to see if something called endoscopic ultrasound can be useful in screening people with a high risk of pancreatic cancer.

-A substance called CA 19-9 is released into the blood by exocrine pancreatic cancer cells and can be detected by blood tests.
-But by the time blood levels are high enough to be consistently detected by available methods, the cancer is no longer in its early stages.
-This is why the test is not recommended for routine screening of people without symptoms or a known diagnosis of cancer.

-The CA 19-9 test is sometimes used during treatment to see if the therapy is working or after treatment to see if the cancer has recurred (come back).

-Another substance, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), can help detect advanced pancreatic cancer in some people. But it isn't sensitive enough to find the cancer early and is not recommended as a screening test.

- Inherited DNA changes are thought to cause as many as 10% of pancreatic cancers.


- Because these inherited cases are sometimes linked with other cancers, determining whether a patient's relatives have an increased risk is not simple.


- Talking to someone with experience in hereditary cancer syndromes such as a genetic counselor, geneticist, or an oncologist is often helpful.

- For people in families at high risk of pancreatic cancer, there are newer tests for detecting early pancreatic cancer that may help.


- One of these is called endoscopic ultrasound


- This test is not used to screen the general public but might be used for someone with a strong family history of pancreatic cancer.

-Using endoscopic ultrasound, doctors have been able to find early, treatable pancreatic cancers in some members of high-risk families.

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