scholarly journals Screening of Pancreatic Cancer for Early Diagnosis

2021 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-115
Author(s):  
Jae Hyuck Chang

Over 80% of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAs) present with symptomatic, surgically unresectable disease. If a “stage shift” from the current 20% proportion of resectability to early detection could be achieved, this would greatly improve the survival of patients with this generally dismal disease. Although the goal of early detection is laudable, the relatively low prevalence of PDA renders general population screening unfeasible. To avoid the perils of overdiagnosis and to focus early detection efforts on individuals deemed to be at higher-than-average risk, we need to define such subsets of individuals, such as kindred of existing patients and those with precursor cystic lesions, chronic pancreatitis, and new-onset diabetes. The next step is to determine when and how often to monitor at-risk individuals and the diagnostic modalities that will be employed in the surveillance. Enormous challenges remain in terms of validated blood-based biomarkers, imaging modalities, and when and how often surveillance.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
Jae Hyuck Chang

More than 80% of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) present with symptomatic, surgically unresectable disease. If a “stage shift” from the current 20% resectable proportion to greater by early detection can be achieved, it will unequivocally lead to improved survival in this otherwise dismal disease. Although the goal of early detection of PDA is laudable, the relatively low prevalence PDA renders general population screening infeasible. To avoid the perils of overdiagnosis and to focus early detection efforts on individuals deemed to be at higher-than-average risk, we need to define those subsets of individuals, such as familial kindred and patients with precursor cystic lesions, chronic pancreatitis, and new-onset diabetes. The next step is to determine when and how often to conduct surveillance in the atrisk individuals and the modalities (biomarkers and imaging) that will be used in the surveillance and diagnostic settings, respectively. Nonetheless, vast challenges still remain in terms of validated blood-based biomarkers, imaging modality, and when and how often the surveillance.


Author(s):  
Atsushi Kanno ◽  
Atsushi Masamune ◽  
Keiji Hanada ◽  
Masataka Kikuyama ◽  
Masayuki Kitano

Early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) requires further examination after selecting cases with risk factors for the condition, such as family history, hereditary pancreatic carcinoma syndrome, intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms, or chronic pancreatitis. The Japan Study Group on the Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer has investigated and clarified the clinicopathological features for the early diagnosis of PDAC. Further approaches for the early diagnosis of PDAC are warranted.


Author(s):  
Dana K. Andersen ◽  
Suresh T. Chari ◽  
Eithne Costello ◽  
Tatjana Crnogorac‐Jurcevic ◽  
Phil A. Hart ◽  
...  

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2565
Author(s):  
Yixing Wu ◽  
Hongmei Zeng ◽  
Qing Yu ◽  
Huatian Huang ◽  
Beatrice Fervers ◽  
...  

Several exosome proteins, miRNAs and KRAS mutations have been investigated in the hope of carrying out the early detection of pancreatic cancer with high sensitivity and specificity, but they have proven to be insufficient. Exosome RNAs, however, have not been extensively evaluated in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of circulating exosome RNAs in pancreatic cancer detection. By retrieving RNA-seq data from publicly accessed databases, differential expression and random-effects meta-analyses were performed. The results showed that pancreatic cancer had a distinct circulating exosome RNA signature in healthy individuals, and that the top 10 candidate exosome RNAs could distinguish patients from healthy individuals with an area under the curve (AUC) of 1.0. Three (HIST2H2AA3, LUZP6 and HLA-DRA) of the 10 genes in exosomes had similar differential patterns to those in tumor tissues based on RNA-seq data. In the validation dataset, the levels of these three genes in exosomes displayed good performance in distinguishing cancer from both chronic pancreatitis (AUC = 0.815) and healthy controls (AUC = 0.8558), whereas a slight difference existed between chronic pancreatitis and healthy controls (AUC = 0.586). Of the three genes, the level of HIST2H2AA3 was positively associated with KRAS status. However, there was no significant difference in the levels of the three genes across the disease stages (stages I–IV). These findings indicate that circulating exosome RNAs have a potential early detection value in pancreatic cancer, and that a distinct exosome RNA signature exists in distinguishing pancreatic cancer from healthy individuals.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 525-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus M. Lerch ◽  
Julia Mayerle ◽  
Ujjwal Mahajan ◽  
Matthias Sendler ◽  
F. Ulrich Weiss ◽  
...  

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the 4th leading cause of cancer death worldwide and compared to other malignancies its share in cancer mortality is expected to rise further. This is due to a lack of sensitive diagnostic tools that would permit earlier detection in a potentially curable stage and the very slow progress in finding effective drug treatments for pancreatic cancer. Key Messages: Aside from genetic predispositions and environmental agents, chronic pancreatitis is by far the greatest risk factor for PDAC. It also shares several etiological factors with pancreatic cancer and represents its most challenging differential diagnosis. Biomarkers that can distinguish between chronic pancreatitis and PDAC may therefore be suitable for the latter's early detection. Moreover, targeting the natural history of chronic pancreatitis would be one approach to prevent PDAC. Targeting tumor-cell signaling directly by interfering with receptor tyrosine kinases has shown some efficacy, although the results in clinical trials were less encouraging than for other cancers. Other compounds developed have targeted the formation of extracellular matrix around the tumor, the proteolytic activity in the tumor environment, histone deacetylases, hedgehog signaling and heat shock proteins, but none has yet found its way into routine patient care. Attempts to individualize treatment according to the tumor's somatic mutation profile are novel but so far impractical. Conclusions: Progress in the treatment of pancreatic cancer has been exceedingly slow and mostly dependent on improved pharmaceutical preparations or combinations of established chemotherapeutic agents. The promise of major breakthroughs implied in targeting tumor signal transduction events has so far not materialized.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2403
Author(s):  
Sahar Ghassem-Zadeh ◽  
Katrin Hufnagel ◽  
Andrea Bauer ◽  
Jean-Louis Frossard ◽  
Masaru Yoshida ◽  
...  

Identification of disease-associated autoantibodies is of high importance. Their assessment could complement current diagnostic modalities and assist the clinical management of patients. We aimed at developing and validating high-throughput protein microarrays able to screen patients’ sera to determine disease-specific autoantibody-signatures for pancreatic cancer (PDAC), chronic pancreatitis (CP), autoimmune pancreatitis and their subtypes (AIP-1 and AIP-2). In-house manufactured microarrays were used for autoantibody-profiling of IgG-enriched preoperative sera from PDAC-, CP-, AIP-1-, AIP-2-, other gastrointestinal disease (GID) patients and healthy controls. As a top-down strategy, three different fluorescence detection-based protein-microarrays were used: large with 6400, intermediate with 345, and small with 36 full-length human recombinant proteins. Large-scale analysis revealed 89 PDAC, 98 CP and 104 AIP immunogenic antigens. Narrowing the selection to 29 autoantigens using pooled sera first and individual sera afterwards allowed a discrimination of CP and AIP from PDAC. For validation, predictive models based on the identified antigens were generated which enabled discrimination between PDAC and AIP-1 or AIP-2 yielded high AUC values of 0.940 and 0.925, respectively. A new repertoire of autoantigens was identified and their assembly as a multiplex test will provide a fast and cost-effective tool for differential diagnosis of pancreatic diseases with high clinical relevance.


Cancers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shingo Kato ◽  
Kazufumi Honda

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers worldwide, and it is typically diagnosed late, with a poor prognosis. Early detection is the most important underlying factor for improving the prognosis of pancreatic cancer patients. One of the most effective strategies for detecting cancers at an early stage is screening of the general population. However, because of the low incidence of pancreatic cancer in the general population, the stratification of subjects who need to undergo further examinations by invasive and expensive modalities is important. Therefore, minimally invasive modalities involving biomarkers and imaging techniques that would facilitate the early detection of pancreatic cancer are highly needed. Multiple types of new blood biomarkers have recently been developed, including unique post-translational modifications of circulating proteins, circulating exosomes, microRNAs, and circulating tumor DNA. We previously reported that circulating apolipoprotein A2 undergoes unique processing in the bloodstream of patients with pancreatic cancer and its precancerous lesions. Additionally, we recently demonstrated a new method for measuring pancreatic proton density in the fat fraction using a fat–water magnetic resonance imaging technique that reflects pancreatic steatosis. In this review, we describe recent developments in potential biomarkers and imaging modalities for the early detection and risk stratification of pancreatic cancer, and we discuss current strategies for implementing screening programs for pancreatic cancer.


Author(s):  
Ernest Osei ◽  
Christabel Oghinan ◽  
Akua Asare ◽  
Hillary Ho ◽  
Solomon Manful

Abstract Background: Pancreatic cancer is the 12th most commonly diagnosed cancer and the 3rd leading cause of cancer mortality and accounts for approximately 2·7% of all newly diagnosed cancer cases and 6·4% of all cancer mortalities in Canada. It has a very poor survival rate mainly due to the difficulty of detecting the disease at an early stage. Consequently, in the advancement of disease management towards the concept of precision medicine that takes individual patient variabilities into account, several investigators have focused on the identification of effective clinical biomarkers with high specificity and sensitivity, capable of early diagnosis of symptomatic patients and early detection of the disease in asymptomatic individuals at high risk for developing pancreatic cancer. Materials and methods: We searched several databases from August to December 2020 for relevant studies published in English between 2000 and 2020 and reporting on biomarkers for the management of pancreatic cancer. In this narrative review paper, we describe 13 clinical and emerging biomarkers for pancreatic cancers used in screening for early detection and diagnosis, to identify patients’ risk for metastatic disease and subsequent relapse, to monitor patient response to specific treatment and to provide clinicians the possibility of prospectively identifying groups of patients who will benefit from a particular treatment. Conclusions: Current and emerging biomarkers for pancreatic cancer with high specificity and sensitivity has the potential to account for individual patient variabilities, for early detection of disease before the onset of metastasis to improve treatment outcome and patients’ survival, help screen high-risk populations, predict prognosis, provide accurate information of patient response to specific treatment and improve patients monitoring during treatment. Thus, the future holds promise for the use of effective clinical biomarkers or a panel of biomarkers for personalised patient-specific targeted medicine for pancreatic cancer.


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