Pancreatic Cancer
Fighting a deathly organism that you know nothing about is complicated, especially one that you can’t see. My grandfather ran into the same problem about thirty years ago with pancreas cancer. The depressing part about him getting it is that he didn’t find out until it was too late to cure himself completely of it, like most pancreatic cancer patients go through.
Pancreatic cancer, to me, is probably one of the most unbeatable cancers you can receive since patients usually don’t find out that they have it until it’s too late. When this happens, doctors won’t do anything dealing with surgery. Therefore, they can’t cure you completely. They will, however, give a patient certain types of treatments in which we will expand on later. Pancreas cancer is a disease in which malignant (or cancer) cells are found in the tissues of the pancreas. Now, pancreas cancer can also refer to a cancer that starts in the pancreas and spreads to other parts of the body like the lungs.
The next topic we will be discussing is the statics of pancreatic cancer, not just in the U.S., but also all over the world. There have been 45,220 new cases and 38,460 deaths just this year. Now that’s a lot considering how often pancreas cancer is supposed to happen. The lifetime risk of a person getting cancer (not including the risk factors that relate to it) is about 1 in 75 people, which is a 1.47% chance. Pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 6% according to the American Cancer Society.
Scientists are not for sure how pancreas cancer is created or even how it gets in a person’s body. They think mutated genes in the pancreas most likely cause this to happen. They do know, however, certain risk factors that may cause it. These r...
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...o remove the head of her pancreas and part of her liver. She was healthy a few months afterwards... at least until it grew back. She’s feeling a lot better now since her pregnancy, not including the side affects of her radiotherapy and chemotherapy that her doctor has her doing once a month.
There are many instances when people don’t know they have pancreas cancer until it’s too late. When this happens, the survival rate is very low, which is also why pancreas cancer is referred to as a “Stealth Killer.” Doctors advise that if you have a chance in getting pancreas cancer, whether it’s because your family has experienced it or if have one the main risk factors, and you have the symptoms, you might want to get your yearly checkup earlier than usual, otherwise it’ll be too late for doctors to cure you completely of pancreas cancer if you turn out to have it.
..., born in 2004, is currently living in Peru. She was born with normal hearts and lungs. She underwent numerous surgeries such as kidney transplant, leg separation and organ reconstruction. When she was just 3 months, doctors operated on her lower extremity for the first time. With each operation, doctors hope to bring her a better and happier lifestyle.
Pancreatic cancer has become a taboo topic that many people are afraid to speak out about. It looms over families like a dark cloud, and manages to destroy people in a scarily short amount of time. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth most dangerous cancer in the United States, and the more we learn about it, the less deadly it becomes. This cancer begins in the pancreas, a gland behind the stomach, that aides in digestion and disperses hormones critical to keep our body functioning. While many people have a mild understanding of pancreatic cancer, most do not realize that “pancreatic cancer” is an umbrella term for many different types of cancerous tumors.
The pancreas is an elongated and flattened gland located within the abdomen. Not only is it a vital part of the digestive system, but it is also a key controller of blood sugar levels. (The Pancreas). The pancreas has been divided into four regions which are the head, neck, body, and tail. Being the widest part of the pancreas, the head is twenty-three millimeters. The part of the head that hooks towards the back of the abdomen is the uncinate (Chronic Pancreatitis Imaging). Between the head and body of the pancreas is the neck, which is about nineteen millimeters. The body of the pancreas is twenty millimeters, between the neck and the tail. The tail is the smallest part of the pancreas, measuring at only fifteen millimeters. (Parts of the Pancreas). The length of the pancreas in total ranges from four point seven to seven point one inches. The pancreas also weighs from seventy to one-hundred grams (How does the Pancreas Work?).
A few months ago, she was diagnosed with leukemia and has been receiving Chemotherapy. The doctors have confessed that the Chemo has not had any impact, and found a donor match for a bone marrow transplant.
Cancer has been an active concern in our society for the past couple decades, since we truly discovered the nature of cancer and the potency it brings along with it. However, it was not until the mid-20th century that scientists were beginning to truly understand the origin of cancer. Scientists dating back all the way to the Renaissance, when they first began performing autopsies to learn more about the human body and form, noticed abnormalities but it never clicked that it was something much worse than it seemed. Research has continued since then, and it has continued to thrive even to this day. When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA and it’s chemical structure in 1962, it opened up doors that even they could not expect. With the understanding of DNA and how it affected the way we look at life, came the beginning of the understanding of mutated DNA (which is a cause of the growth of cancerous cells). In this past century, researching scientists discovered that cancer is linked with the DNA that resides in a cell’s nucleus. By ways of damage to the cells via chemicals or radiation, or even introduction of a new DNA, the cancerous cells begin to form and duplicate. We are learning more and more about cancer and how to fight it, but we still have much more to learn.
Many cancer diagnoses have high percentage of survival rate with proper treatment including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. However, there is one considerable cancer diagnosis that ultimately has a very low percentage of survival. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States and the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide. By 2020, pancreatic cancer is estimated to be the second leading cause of cancer death (Pancreatic Cancer Network, 2014). Pancreatic cancer accounts for a very small percentage of the cancers diagnosed each year; however has a less than 5% five-year survival rate. This is greatly due to the demographics of the pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
Scientists still do not know exactly what may cause most cases of Pancreatic Cancer, but they have found several risk factors that can make a person more likely to get this disease. In recent research, there has been a risk shown that a majority of these risk factors affect DNA of the cells of the pancreas. This can result in abnormal cell growth and may cause tumors to form.
There have been extraordinary progresses in identifying cancer at the cellular level and the question of how cancer cells develop are no longer a secret. Although there are many different types of cancer and almost every tissue can turn into malignancies, the basic processes of how cancer arises are very similar. While normal body cells follow the orderly path of cell cycle and only reproduce when instructed to do so, cancer cells violate the schedule and ignore instructions, it fails to follow the orderly enzymatic reaction which is responsible for the deletion of cells with damaged DNA (Kerr et al. 1994). Cancer cells enter cell cycle repeatedly until it will eventually disrupt the function of tissues and organs that are essential to the organism (Weinberg 1996). Not all types of cancer are fatal, benign cancer is a type of cancer which stays in one location only, in another word it will not m...
Another problem people have with the pancreas is pancreatic cancer. Each year about 29,000 Americans and 3,000 Canadians are diagnosed with it.
“Since 1990, over 6 million Americans have died of cancer, more than the combined casualties from the Civil war, WWII, and the Vietnam and Korean conflicts combined” (Faguet, p. 5). According to American Cancer Society projections, there were 1,529,560 new cases of cancer in 2010. Cancer is becoming more and more common around the world. New cancers are constantly being discovered. Researchers are finding new ways to detect cancer and treat it so that the fatality rate does not rise. However, there are some cancers that researchers have not yet discovered a cure for. It is very important for Cancer Research to continue so that one day these cancers will no longer be a treat.
She got a new disease called stenotrophomonas, which is very difficult to treat. She was becoming pan-resistant, meaning she was resistant to everything. She had a bacteria called Gram negative. This bacteria has an armor formed around the negative bacteria that makes it harder for normal antibiotics to cure it. She was left with only one option, a lung transplant. For one, it was a very risky option since her body was so weak, and two, she would have to wait until a transplant even came up for her to have. She ended up getting the lung transplant though. Two years after she came home from the operation and she is still alive, but she has to be very cautious every day. She takes a handful of prescriptions twice a day and still picks up bacteria easily. Her mom said she has gotten pneumonia twice already. Her life is now extremely difficult, but she is at least
To understand more about this disease I did a research on it, and according to the National Cancer Institute: “Cancer is a term used for diseases in which abnormal cells divide without control and are able to invade other tissues. Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body through the blood and lymph system”. Also, there are more than 100 different types of cancer. Cancer is not a single disease, but a group of related diseases.
The American Cancer Society publishes current advances made in cancer research on their website. Many of the exciting discoveries about how best to treat the disease focus on the genetic aspects associated with certain types of cancer. In addition, treatments aimed at genetic solutions to cancer may be more effective and may cause fewer adverse side effects than traditional cancer treatments (American Can...
She was told of the diagnosis. We did not hide the fact that she was given a diagnosis that she would be going home a vegetable, if she ever made it out. She made her decision that day, she wanted to go home. And so she did. She was no longer able to move anything other than her head by that point. She was bedridden and needed...
Like far too many others, cancer has posed as the greatest hurdle in my life. When I was twelve years old, my grandfather was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a rare and largely incurable form of cancer that proves to be immensely aggressive to the body of which it takes over. As fortunate as I was to live just down the road from my grandparents’ farm, I