Pancreatic Cancer

Carcinoma of the pancreas is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Most patients with pancreatic carcinoma present clinically with abdominal pain, with jaundice, or with protean symptoms related to the distant effects of the carcinoma. More recently, octreotide scanning and ultrafast echo-planar MRI have also shown promise in imaging the pancreas. Most neoplasms do not cause symptoms and cannot be detected using standard imaging techniques until they are at least 1 cm in size. Despite the striking histological appearance of early neoplasms of the pancreas, histological changes cannot form the basis of a screening test for early pancreatic neoplasia. The expression of other genes may also form the basis of screening tests for pancreatic cancer.