Pancreatic cancer has extremely low five year survival rates. This is because there are few if any symptoms in the early stages. In four out of five case, it is detected after it has spread, making surgery ineffective. Researchers in Britain and Spain have now come up with a simple urine test that promises to detect it in its earliest stages.
The test looks for three proteins in the patient's urine which provide a unique "fingerprint" for pancreatic cancer.
The research looked at almost 500 urine samples. Just under 200 were from patients with pancreatic cancer, 92 from patients with chronic pancreatitis and 87 from healthy volunteers.
The rest of the samples were from patients with benign and cancerous liver and gall bladder conditions.
Out of 1,500 proteins found in the urine samples, three - LYVE1, REG1A and TFF1 - were seen to be at much higher levels in the pancreatic cancer patients, providing a "protein signature" that could identify the most common form of the disease.
The signature was found to be 90% accurate.
Patients with chronic pancreatitis were found to have lower levels of the same three proteins.
More research is needed to verify the test and this will at first concentrate on those with a genetic predisposition to pancreatic cancer so it will be some time before the test becomes available generally. If it is proven to be able to identify "stage 1" cancer, it could save
thousands of lives each year.
Almost 9,000 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the UK every year, with about half of those affected aged 75 or older. It is the 11th most common cancer and the 5th most common cause of cancer death in the UK.
Just one per cent of patients survived ten years after diagnosis with pancreatic cancer in 2010/11, according to Cancer Research UK. Three per cent survived five years and 21 per cent survived one year. The average survival rate for one year of all cancers was 70 per cent.
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If diagnosed in Stage 1, pancreatic cancer patients would have a 60 per cent chance of surviving.