United States: Experts have noticed that more young adults are being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which has raised concerns. However, new research shows that even though the number of cases has increased, the number of deaths from the disease has not gone up.
Scientists think this is happening because modern imaging scans are much better at detecting early stages of pancreatic cancer, especially in people under 40. These early cases may not have been found in the past, and they are often less dangerous, which is why more people are surviving.
As reported by the HealthDay, “Alerts based on a number of registries have raised concerns over the rising trends of pancreatic cancer among the youth especially the women in the United States and across the world,” the researchers concluded in their paper. Whereas some might have blamed this trend on rising obesity levels, other research have not noted any correlation.
But when the team drilled down on the data, they came to a surprising conclusion: This is where it becomes particularly cliche: statistical data referring to pancreatic cancer are based on two different forms of tumors that simply occur in the same organ – endocrine cancers and adenocarcinomas.
The first type of cancer can take a number of years, sometimes even decades to develop and metastasise, which is the process by which the cancer spreads to different parts of the body, while the second type, is determined by cancer cells that rapidly multiply and invade other parts of the body.
According to the researchers, by increasing the relative importance of the early-stage endocrine cancer the researchers were in fact only observing higher rates of pancreatic cancer in younger Americans but not the adenocarcinoma type.
It seems that new cases of pancreatic cancer are increasing, though mortality is stable, which means that “number of newly diagnoses early-onset pancreatic cancer may increase because of improved detection rather than increased incidence of the disease.”
In the study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers led by Dr. Vishal Patel, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, did not not argue that cases of pancreatic cancer are indeed rising among the young:
Specifically, the overall trend of total pancreatic cancer surgery from 2001 to 2019 was increasing in both sex and age groups, and this increase reached about twofold for both women and men under 39 years of age.
Notably, the rise was for cancer conditions that had not advanced to any stage beyond stage 0. That finding points to a phenomenon known as overdiagnosis: When the incidence has gone up but deaths have not increased at the same rate still.