Pancreatic cancer is scary as hell because there's no warning signs until it's too late. I wonder why we're not doing more to develop blood tests or other ways to detect this much earlier in the process when the results are so binary, and it's also increasing in terms of number of cases every year.
More cases are showing up because the largest population boom in human history, the baby boomers, are just hitting the retirement age. This type of cancer is highly correlated with the population size unlike other cancers which may be correlated by diet such as liver cancer, from drinking alcohol, or lung cancer, from smoking.
> other ways to detect this much earlier in the process
It is detected very easily, if you are lucky enough to have a checkup that coincides with the window of it being fairly benign
The unfortunate thing is that nobody knows how fast the cancer even grows. So even if you were paranoid and had checkups every 3 months for the rest of your life, you could still miss it before Stage IV.
For what you describe, this cancer would require something like nanomachines in the blood stream that detect and report the most minute composition changes.
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Serious question: How much are we doing?
It is detected very easily, if you are lucky enough to have a checkup that coincides with the window of it being fairly benign
The unfortunate thing is that nobody knows how fast the cancer even grows. So even if you were paranoid and had checkups every 3 months for the rest of your life, you could still miss it before Stage IV.
For what you describe, this cancer would require something like nanomachines in the blood stream that detect and report the most minute composition changes.
There’s some hope that a genomic cancer screen like Grail is pursuing will help.