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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Isn't pancreatic cancer in particular usually very far advanced before it's detected?

By the time my friends dad had pancreatic cancer detected, he died within 6 weeks. It’s also the fastest growing cancer in the US. Every time I read about someone dying of cancer quite often it’s pancreatic cancer and it terrifies me.

Yes, unless you get lucky.

They find spots on the pancreas by accident all the time. It is incredibly common. I know, I have one: I got an abdominal CT scan while getting something unrelated checked. Some of these go on to be cancer, and sometimes they know it is precancerous. The cyst I have wasn't immediately precancerous. Now I get regular MRIs to check on it. Since I have no symptoms, there is really nothing else to do.

That lack of symptoms, though, is a real issue. If you have a little bit of cancer and no symptoms and you don't find it accidentally, it is going to be much, much harder to detect early.

If it's so deadly and widely asymptomatic until it's way too late, why don't we screen for it? Or is that problem, that we don't have a good screening test other than expensive and time consuming MRI?

Screening isn't really helpful because it isn't good enough. We find all of these lesions, but the vast majority don't result in anything that needs treated nor do they appear to have symptoms. They are just there. So right now, we just watch them. I'm guessing if we knew how common they were, could better tell between normal and cancerous, or heck, even knew why they were so common, we could do better.

But we just aren't there yet.

And unfortunately, this is the case for a number or screenings - and is a downside of some routine screenings. I keep hoping that once we understand a variety of cancer better, this will improve.

FWIW, mine was found on a CT scan and all the monitoring was on an MRI - and both expensive (thankfully the out of pocket costs for healthcare here are low) and uncomfortable for some folks.

In general the worst cancers are the ones that are difficult to detect early enough before they metastasize. As the article says, this death rate has dropped mostly because of preventative care and early screening.

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