What makes pancreatic cancer so deadly in comparison to other cancers?

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What makes pancreatic cancer so deadly in comparison to other cancers?

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37 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It causes few to no symptoms in the early stages, so generally isn’t caught until it has widely spread.

My father’s best friend wasn’t feeling well in late June, had some tests done, was dead in September

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In addition to what others have mentioned about it being relatively asymptomatic until too late, the pancreas makes and delivers digestive enzymes. There is significant pain from your digestive enzymes leaking out and literally digesting the area around it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Dont know but a friend of mine (45)m just beat stage 4 pancreatic cancer never give up you can overcome it!!

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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. 🙁

Anonymous 0 Comments

Step-dad went from feeling fine/ riding his motorcycle to Yellow in a week. He finally gave up on chemo and died maybe 4/5 months later.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My wife died from pancreatic cancer last year, about six months after being diagnosed. Besides the lack of symptoms, it’s also very difficult to cut out because of all of the blood vessels. One oncologist described it as cutting gum out of your hair. The one-year survival rate is only about 25%.