Pancreatic Cancer Growth Rate May Give Time for Early Detection

Pancreatic cancer, long thought by doctors to be fast growing and almost unbeatable, develops slowly enough to allow for at least a decade of screening that may increase chances of survival, university researchers said.

Tissue from seven newly deceased patients showed that cells in the pancreas took at least 10 years to mutate enough to produce the first cancer cells, and seven more years before a tumor could develop and become capable of spreading to other organs. On average, patients died two years after all that, according to a study released today in Nature.