Pancreatic Cancer: A Case Study

Pancreatic cancer, a disease primarily affecting elderly on the range of 60 of age and above, has ranked as fourth causes of cancer-related death with the 5-year survival rate less than 5% in the United State. As reported by (Morana et al., 2010), the prevalence of tumors originated in the pancreatic head is 60%, 15% in the body while 5% of pancreatic tumors originate in the tail. The pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the most common type of pancreatic cancer originating from the pancreatic head. A review reported by (Oberstein and Olive, 2013) has stated that the difficulty of detecting and treating the pancreatic diseases are related with the anatomical nature of the pancreas and the occurrence of the diseases in an advanced age of patients. The pancreas is a retroperitoneal organ, situated at the deep of the abdominal region. It is surrounded by other abdominal organs; the liver superiorly, the abdomen anteriorly, the spleen and small intestine. The head of pancreas, in addition, is inclusively surrounded by the duodenum curve of the small intestine (Applegate, 2010). The inherent location of the
The symptoms of PDAC, according to (Buchs et al., 2010), includes the abdominal pain, jaundice and/ or unexplained weight loss. Furthermore, the PDAC is usually manifest as a syndrome with its own unusual features, for example microscopically metastasized at its early stage of disease and the formation of ‘desmoplastic stroma’ (proliferating of fibroblast) which limits the access of therapeutic agents to the affected organ, thus reducing the probability to detect and treat the disease (Oberstein and Olive, 2013). Under those circumstances, early detection of the PDAC by imaging modalities and clinical diagnosis is impossible as the diseases may only be detected in its advanced