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What are the three key suspicious problems that may mean you have pancreas cancer?

 The first step to good cancer treatment is to establish the correct diagnosis. Every diagnosis is made by looking at certain changes in the human body. We, doctors have tools like asking questions to learn more about your symptoms, an examination of suspicious looking changes in your body (by touching and pressing, large sized changes can be felt), blood tests, different scans which can examine the particular organ from multiple angles.

1. Obstructive jaundice

Jaundice is a medical term for yellowing of the eyes. (Point to remember: This is not a diagnosis. Jaundice is a symptom) There are many causes of jaundice. When a person has jaundice with itching all over the body, or white colored stools, then the possibility of having a mechanical problem arises. Mechanical problems in the human body need a surgeon to correct them. 

2. Dilated bile duct
Normal human bile duct is less than 6 mm in diameter. Aged people and sometimes, after removal of the gall bladder, the bile duct may enlarge to more than 8 mm. Dilated bile duct is detected on scans - either ultrasound or CT scan. There is a pattern reading here - if the gall bladder is filled like a bag and is very large, there is more chance of having a cancer as the underlying cause. This is called a Courvoisier's law. 

3. Dilated pancreatic duct
The third presentation is to look at the pancreatic duct. If the pancreatic duct is more than 4 mm, it is considered to be dilated. There are more subtle variations in this, which I feel will be very complex to explain to a non- medical forum.

This is more true if one has a mass or swelling in the body and tail of the pancreas.

We use these 3 cardinal symptoms to look for an early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in the human body. NCCN recommends these as the first step to pancreas cancer diagnosis. Following these symptoms, we discuss in a multi disciplinary team and take the next step of tests to stage the pancreas cancer.


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