Pancreatic cancer cases rising in young women–
Pancreatic cancer has typically been more common in men.
The following written content via Newsmax Health
In his work with patients who have pancreatic cancer, Dr. Srinivas Gaddam was bothered by something that he was seeing.
“There are some patients that you can’t stop thinking about because they’ve left a mark on you and you try your best to turn things around, but there’s only so much you can do,” said Gaddam, who said he had found himself caring for a few patients who were very young.
“We knew that there was a trend [of younger patients] in colon cancer, but we didn’t know about pancreas cancer. So, I decided to see if there was a real trend. Was it just that I happened to see those few young patients disproportionate to everybody else in the field,” said Gaddam, who is an assistant professor of medicine in the Karsh Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It turns out to be true.”
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What Gaddam and the other researchers noticed is that numbers of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, sometimes referred to as a silent killer because it’s more difficult to detect in its early stages, have been growing the past two decades for both men and women.
Even more surprisingly, they found the disease was disproportionately growing in younger women, those under age 55, and especially among those aged 15 to 34, though the sample size was small. Pancreatic cancer has typically been more common in men.
If the current trend continues, researchers said pancreatic cancer among women aged 15 to 34 would grow to be 400% of that experienced by men of the same ages by 2040.
“This study doesn’t answer why, it shines a light on the fact that it’s rising and it’s rising disproportionate to that of men,” Gaddam said.
Without knowing why, the answer for now is left open to speculation. It could be that women have a disproportionately high exposure to some environmental risk factor in recent decades that researchers don’t understand yet, Gaddam said.
A deadly disease if not caught early, Read more from Newsmax Health.
