It’s uncommon enough that large scale preventative screening (like we have for colon cancer, for instance) isn’t economically viable or feasible, yet it also has a tendency not to produce any symptoms until it is already advanced into other organs (it also has a tendency to spread to the liver, a nasty place to get metastasis to). So people don’t tend to find out it’s there until it’s already too late to do anything highly effective to get rid of it.
In early stages pancreatic cancer is pretty asymptomatic. By the time a person behinds to suspect that something is wrong, the tumor has already spread from where it began into other tissues of the body. By the time this happens it’s incredibly hard to find and treat all the others where the tumor cells spread to whiteout damaging a persons normal tissues.
In addition to the symptom-based explanations given so far, the pancreas is really difficult to remove or operate on. There is a surgery (the Whipple procedure) for it, but it is a highly traumatic replumbing of your insides. It would wreck even the healthiest person, so many people simply opt not to go for it and let nature take its course.
As an addition to the other answer, many people think that the difference between cancers is just where it started. While it’s true that skin cancer starts in the skin and liver cancer starts in the liver, the diseases themselves are very different. Cancer is not one disease but rather a family of diseases that have some similar properties. This is all to say that the underlying mutations responsible for pancreatic cancer make that cancer particularly aggressive and difficult to treat.
34 year old man jogged across the road on vacation. Thought he pulled a muscle. Went home and few days later soon to er. Accused of pain med seeking and sent back to work. Went thru another week of pain at home. ER second visit found out he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer with metastasis and started chemo like the next day. He died about 4 weeks later. 🙁
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