Pancreatic Cancer Treatment

What are the Risk Factors of Pancreatic Cancer?

There are certain risk factors that may increase your chances of developing pancreatic cancer. You may be at an increased risk:

• If you smoke cigarettes — 30 percent of cancer cases are related to cigarette smoking
• If you are obese
• If you don’t exercise regularly
• If you eat diets high in fat content
• If you drink heavy amounts of alcohol
• If you have diabetes
• If you work with pesticides and chemicals
• If you have chronic inflammation of the pancreas
• If you have liver damage
• If you have a family history of pancreatic cancer or certain genetic disorders that have been linked to this type of cancer

How is Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosed?

Pancreatic cancer may be difficult to detect because of its location, and is often diagnosed in more advanced stages of the disease.

Your doctor will review your symptoms to make a diagnosis. Your doctor could also perform one or more of the following tests to check for pancreatic cancer:

• CT or MRI scans to get a complete and detailed image of your pancreas.
• Endoscopic ultrasound, is when a thin, flexible tube with a camera attached is inserted down into the stomach to obtain images of the pancreas.
• Biopsy, or tissue sample, of the pancreas.
• Blood tests to check whether tumor marker CA 19-9 is present, which indicates pancreatic cancer.

What are the Stages of Pancreatic Cancer?

Once a diagnosis is made, your doctor will assign you a stage based on the test results:

• Stage 1: When tumors exist in the pancreas only.
• Stage 2: When tumors have spread to nearby abdominal tissues or lymph nodes.
• Stage 3: when the cancer has spread to major blood vessels and lymph nodes.
• Stage 4: When tumors have spread to other organs, such as the liver.

What are the Treatment Options for Pancreatic Cancer?

Pancreatic cancer is not curable, but it can improve the survival rate. The purpose for pancreatic cancer treatment is to kill the cancerous cells and to prevent the spread of the disease.

Surgery

Most pancreatic cancer goes undetected until it reaches stage 4 (IV). Surgery is not suitable for people with advanced stage pancreatic cancer. If the cancer has spread to other areas of the body, then removing the tumor or pancreas is not the solution. The most common surgeries for pancreatic cancer are:

• Distal pancreatectomy, where the middle and end part of the pancreas is removed, leaving the ‘head’ of the organ intact.
• Total pancreatectomy, where the entire pancreas is removed, along with portions of adjacent organs and structures like the stomach.
• Whipple procedure (pancreaticoduodenectomy), possibly the most common surgery for pancreatic cancer, which removes the bulbous head of the pancreas, the gallbladder, the bile duct, part of the stomach and part of the small intestine.

Surgery alone is not the complete treatment plan for pancreatic cancer. Most people receive a combination of radiation therapy and chemotherapy after the surgery.

Radiotherapy

Radiotherapy uses high energy beams from X-rays and protons to destroy cancer cells that remain in the pancreas. Depending on the size and location of the pancreatic tumor, radiation therapy destroys the cancer cells and shrinks the overall size of the malignancy. 

• External beam radiation: where a machine will target the affected area with radiation beams.
• Brachytherapy: The surgeon uses radioactive ‘seeds’ placed into or near the tumor inside the body.
• Both the approaches can reduce the number and size of cancer cells within the pancreas.

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is used after surgery to kill any cancer cells that may remain in the pancreas. 

• Chemotherapy can be used alone or can be combined with radiation therapy (chemoradiation). 
• Chemoradiation is used to treat cancer that has not spread beyond the pancreas to other organs.
• Chemoradiation may be used before surgery to shrink cancers and make them easier to remove.
• Chemoradiation is also used after surgery to reduce the risk that pancreatic cancer may recur.
• In advanced pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy can be used to relieve pain and prolong survival.

Targeted Therapy

Targeted drug treatments focus on specific abnormalities present within the cancer cells for pancreatic cancer. These drugs are designed not to harm healthy or normal cells.

• Targeted drug treatment blocks the growth of new blood vessels that help the cancer grow and survive and thus destroy the cancer cells.
• Targeted therapy drugs are reserved for people with advanced or recurrent pancreatic cancer.
• Targeted Therapies work only in those people whose cancer cells have certain genetic mutations.

*Weight loss, bowel obstruction, abdominal pain, and liver failure are some of the complications during pancreatic cancer treatment.

How can you Prepare yourself for the Pancreatic Cancer Treatment?

• The first and foremost thing that you need to do is keep yourself well informed about your cancer, this improves your quality of life as this can make the disease seem less mysterious and frightening. Information from your doctor and other credible sources can be very helpful in this respect.
• When a person is diagnosed with cancer it has an adverse effect on their emotional state, so you need to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally. This can be done by being transparent with your family and friends about how you feel, the problems you have been facing so that they can help you in a better way. And as a peer or a family member of the patient, you must support them at all times by listening to them patiently as they are emotionally down.
• You can avail services of a counsellor or attend group therapies consisting of people sharing their past experiences of cancer.
• Writing down about your queries, problems, new symptoms, any physical changes, medications, past medical reports and other important things will help you to clearly express yourself to the doctor.

How do we care about your Pancreatic Cancer Treatment?

About a decade Treatment Possible has been involved in guiding patients to undergo treatment in India, our main objective is to provide the best options for your treatment of pancreatic cancer in India at the lowest cost. Thus, we recognize the significance of excellent health and well-being of our guests by preferring association with Top oncologists and Best Hospitals for pancreatic cancer treatment in India.

We encourage you to educate yourself about the procedure, cost, treatment plan for pancreatic cancer, travel & stay, etc and then make a decision. For an early response from a case manager, Medical History and Diagnostic Reports can be sent to care@treatmentpossible.com. Treatment Possible invites you for a Free Consultation with chosen Top pancreatic Cancer Surgeons in India with the assurance of hassle-free arrangements for examinations, procedures, recovery, travel and stay.