When you hear someone has cancer you may have many questions about what they are feeling and how their cancer was found. What I am going to do is go through some of the different types of cancers and what the symptoms are so if you notice some of them that you will make the call to the doctor.
The first cancer I am going to talk about is PANCREATIC CANCER. Pancreatic cancer has been in the news the last few years some well known people. Pancreatic cancer has taken the life of Patrick Swayze,Steve Jobs, Michael Landon, Count Basie, Joan Crawford and inspirational speaker and computer scientist Randy Pausch.
Quite often when a person is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the outcome is not very optimistic. Most pancreatic cancers are not found very early a big part of the reason for that is that the pancreas is located in a part of the body that makes it hard for tumors to be felt. Many doctors miss pancreatic cancers during the physical examination. Your pancreas is located behind your stomach so you really can’t feel it.
Patients will most likely have no symptoms until the cancer has spread to another organ which would raise the staging of the tumor. The higher the cancer stage the higher the fatality rate.
There are risk factors for pancreatic cancer that you should keep in mind when considering risk factors remember just because you may or may not have a risk factor it does not mean you cannot get cancer. Some of the risk factors are your age, most pancreatic cancers are found in patients over the age of 45 with 90% of patients being over the age of 55. There is a higher incident of patients who have smoked, this surprised me because when you think of cancers caused by smoking you will think of oral, throat and lung but pancreatic does not come to mind. There may be a genetic link with pancreatic cancer.
If you have any of these risk factors you need to talk with your doctor there is a diagnostic test called a endoscopic ultrasound that can examine your pancreas for signs of disease. Unfortunately this test is not available to everyone and is currently only being used if there is concerns that you may have pancreatic cancer or if you are at a high risk of developing it because of your risk factors.
Like many cancers pancreatic cancers does release an enzyme that can be found in your blood however they do not recommend just going by the blood test because by the time the levels are high enough to detect the cancer has already progressed.