Pancreatic Cancer Facts

There isn't one single test that will confirm or exclude pancreatic cancer.

Why you need your pancreas

• Your pancreas produces pancreatic juices to help digest food.
• Other pancreatic cells produce hormones, including insulin, which helps the body regulate the amount of sugar in the blood.

Symptoms and diagnosis of pancreatic cancer

Unfortunately in most cases of organ cancers, symptoms will only show up when the cancer has been done already exessive damage and therefore treatment as we know now is mostly very unlikely to give optimistic results.

Mostly the tumor will grow so big and start pushing the organs around it until:

1. you feel your belly starts to hurt
2. it obstructs something, you notice something is wrong but wont easily conclude it's a tumor causing the obstruction.

1. Often the pressure of a large tumour pushing on other organs or parts of the body which is the first clue something is wrong. That's something my father diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer had to endure as well.
   
    
2. When, for example, your tumour expands and blocks the bile duct from the nearby gall bladder, then jaundice can be the result.

Other symptoms that something could be wrong:

• urine may become darker.
• nausea, weight loss and weakness. (again not straightforward to say that the cause of all this is pancreatic cancer, as these were also symptoms of father's liver cancer)

Pain is still the most basic human sensation to tell you "something is wrong".

When you have pain in your belly, very little people will immediately make the connection with a tumor pressing on your organs.

When you have a tumor in your belly, there will be less space in your belly. So the more you eat, the more pain you will feel...

The rare "insulin cells' pancreatic cancer"

The above symptoms are for the "carcinoma of the pancreas" pancreatic cancer.

A rare form of pancreatic cancer cause problems with the cells making insulin.

This pancreas cancer can causes the pancreas to make too much insulin.

Symptoms are equal to the symptoms of a diabetic getting too much insulin:

• include dizziness,
• muscle spasms or
• diarrhoea.

How to be sure you have or haven't pancreatic cancer

If pancreatic cancer is suspected, there are a number of tests doctors can order to check this.

• A biopsy operation normally is the last examonation to complete a cancer diagnosis. This involves taking a tiny tissue sample from the tumour. This means already that you know you have a tumor...
• In some cases, a probe is passed through a small cut into the abdomen to see how far the disease has spread.

Other tests involve:

• CT scans,
• MRI scans or
• the use of ultrasound.

More specific procedures involve swallowing or injecting dye that shows up on x-rays into the ducts.

The : "let's have a real look" option, more humanely called "laparotomy" operation: this involves a large cut so surgeons can look up closely at all your organs.

Who is at risk

When trying to understand the symptoms, the medical staff will or should ask more specific questions about what their patient does or has been doing in his or her life.

The following circumstances place people at higher risk:

• smokers are up to three times more likely to get pancreatic cancer. In other words:
  
  the healthier the air you bread, the longer you live.
  
• people who eat too much fat and not enough vegetables at increased risk.
  pesticides in plants will accumulate 10 times stronger in the meat you eat than when you would eat those plants yourself.. In other words:
  
  the healthier you eat, the longer you live.
  

• people who have diabetes are also more likely to get pancreatic cancer
• heavy consumption of alcohol also have an increased risk of pancreatic cancer
• environmental factors such as working with petrol and some chemicals have also been linked with this cancer, although this has not been proven.

Always consult a doctor when you are experiencing any of the above symptoms or any problems that can't be exactly diagnosed and keep on for more than a week.