Jerry Springer’s death puts pancreatic cancer, called a silent killer, under microscope

[ad_1]

Among the organs in the human body, the pancreas is one most people know little about.”The pancreas is upper abdomen, behind the stomach. So it’s right here,” Dr. Syed Ahmad said, moving his hands across the middle section of his upper body. “So when patients develop abdominal pain, it’s usually right here, radiating to the back.”Ahmad leads UC Health’s Pancreas Disease Center. He said pain that radiates from the abdomen to a person’s back could signal a case of pancreatic cancer, the kind of cancer that cut former Cincinnati mayor, WLWT-TV anchor and talk show host Jerry Springer’s life short.”It’s a silent cancer, and that’s why it’s a bad cancer,” he said. “Unfortunately, pancreas cancer does not get diagnosed until later stages because it remains asymptomatic until it gets to the later stages.”Ahmad and his colleagues are doing research on pancreatic cancer in multiple labs, and they’re using screening programs to check people who have a family history of the disease. Their goal is to significantly boost the disease’s survival rate.”We have labs looking at how the pancreas cancer cells survive, how they multiply and spread and ways to stop it,” Ahmad said. “It’s one of the most deadly cancers that we treat.”That fact is not lost on Dr. Maisam Abu-El-Haija. She treats young people at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who are dealing with a painful disease called pancreatitis.”There is some link that we don’t fully understand yet between the genetic causes of hereditary pancreatitis — in chronic pancreatitis patients – that could lead to an increased risk for pancreas cancer,” Dr. Abu-El Haija said.She knows that’s a sobering thought for young patients and their parents, and Abu-El Haija is determined to find early warning signs that could point to future cases of pancreatic cancer.”And what would that mean? That would mean that we can risk stratify the patients,” she said. “Early detection could hopefully allow us to reverse that trajectory.”Doctors are working to learn more specifics about what causes pancreatic cancer. One of the biggest causes, according to Ahmad, is smoking cigarettes.

[ad_2]

Source link

Source: News