Diagnosing Pancreatic Cancer – Earlier

The diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is more of a death knell than that for practically any other cancer. The 5-year survival rate is less than 5%, one of the lowest. This is largely because the diagnosis comes too late for any active treatment to be effective. But a little hope is offered by a new technique reported in Clinical Cancer Research.

Light-scattering technology is used to assess the minute architecture of the epithelium of the duodenal lining near the opening of the pancreatic duct (the ampulla). This is done by passing a tube down the gullet to the stomach and then through into the duodenum. Close-up biopsies of the epithelium were obtained from 19 pancreatic cancer patients and compared with those from 32 control (non-cancerous) subjects. The cells were analyzed using 4-dimensional elastic light-scattering fingerprinting and a novel type of spectroscopy.

The cells from the cancer patients could be distinguished from the normal controls with 95% sensitivity and 91% specificity, without any influence from the tumor location or stage. This is clearly a breakthrough in early diagnosis using a minimally invasive approach; it should be fully explored and utilized if we are to see an impact on pancreatic cancer.