Controversy on the time to progression of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is considered to be a highly aggressive and rapidly progressive disease by clinicians, which is one of the reasons why patients usually present at advanced stages of the disease and have a poor prognosis.1 In fact, this appears to be confirmed by the low number of small pancreatic cancers documented in population-based registries. Only 1.4% of 13 131 patients with pancreatic cancer in the SEER database (US National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) had tumours <1 cm, and even in these cases 30.1% had regional and 10.1% had distant metastases.2 These observations have been challenged by computational modelling of genome sequence data generated by comparative lesion sequencing of matched primary pancreatic cancers and distinct metastases of seven patients with end-stage pancreatic cancer.3 Yachida et al3 predicted a long time interval of approximately 21 years from the initiating...
Source: Gut - Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Tags: Commentary Source Type: research