Nearly half of all pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed as a result of an emergency presentation to A&E – a much higher percentage than for most other adult cancers. Pancreatic cancer nurse specialist, DIANNE DOBSON, highlights the action that must be to be taken to improve diagnosis and survival.
Pancreatic cancer remains a disease where over 80% of patients are diagnosed at a point when there is no option for curative treatment. Every year in the UK, 8,800 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and 8,700 die each year.
Less than 4% of people survive for five years or more – a statistic which has hardly changed in the last 40 years.1 While survival rates are similarly low in the rest of Europe, research has shown that if the UK performed at the same level as a core group of 13 European countries, we could see an average (mean) of an extra 124 patients surviving beyond five years.2
Why is early detection so hard?
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