Pancreatic cancer “will be Portugal’s second deadliest cancer by 2035”
Portugal Resident
Smoking is the main risk factor, followed by obesity
Pancreatic cancer is expected to be the second deadliest cancer in Portugal by 2035, with more than 2,000 deaths a year, an expert warned on Thursday.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there were 2,086 deaths in the country due to pancreatic cancer in 2022, making it the fifth leading cause of death from cancer.
The figures for 2022 indicate that the cancer that causes the most deaths is lung cancer (5,077), followed by colorectal cancer (4,809), stomach cancer (2,578) and breast cancer (2,578).
While “some advances have been made in terms of research” to detect pancreatic cancer at an earlier stage, there has been an increase in the disease’s incidence, said Eduardo Rodrigues Pinto, president of the Portuguese Pancreatic Club, in an interview with Lusa news agency to mark World Pancreatic Cancer Day.
“There has been an increase in this incidence and so it is thought that by 2035 it will be the second cause of death (from cancer) with more than 2,000 deaths a year. These are the less favourable prospects that lead us to try to alert the public that there are ways of trying to prevent it or, when it’s not preventable, try to diagnose it at an earlier stage,” Rodrigues Pinto said.
As he explained, people with pancreatic cancer “are complex patients” who “should be managed in hospitals with multidisciplinary teams”.
“Hospitals are currently stratified as reference centres and therefore this type of pathology should be treated in reference centres. These reference centres include gastroenterologists, surgeons, oncologists and radiologists – all specialists who are dedicated to this type of pathology,” he emphasised.
The gastroenterology specialist explained that “only 20% of patients” are suitable for “curative treatment” through surgery.
“All the others will ideally be candidates for treatment with chemotherapy or radiotherapy and, whenever possible, patients should be included in clinical trials. However, we should try to see what new therapies are being developed to see if they are more suitable or not for each patient,” he said.
Eduardo Rodrigues Pinto said that while pancreatic cancer mostly occurs in people over the age of 50, “there has been an increasing number of diagnoses in younger people”.
“There have been some advances in terms of research, such as biomarkers to detect pancreatic cancer at an earlier stage. Ideally, in the future, we should have a blood test that would allow this diagnosis. In terms of treatments, the advances have been in personalising the treatment to the patient, by carrying out research into specific mutations in each tumour, in which we then target our treatments to the type of mutation that each patient has,” he said.
The specialist also said that, in addition to colonoscopy from the age of 45, there should be a screening programme for the public, because there are people with “a family history of pancreatic cancer, or who have chronic diseases with a genetic predisposition or hereditary syndromes”.
“There are some diseases in which there is a very high incidence of pancreatic cancer in these types of people, and these patients, as part of study protocols, could be included in screening programmes carried out at hospital level,” he said.
Smoking is the main risk factor, followed by obesity. Alcohol consumption, especially in patients with chronic pancreatitis, diabetes mellitus, a diet rich in fat and red meat, and a sedentary lifestyle are also associated with the disease.
“These are all risk factors that we must try to explain and educate the public about, so that people change their lifestyles,” he added.
Source: LUSA
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