It's one of the most aggressive forms cancer out there and has been brought back into the limelight as a popular game show host recently revealed he has been diagnosed with it.
Longtime "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek announcing early this week that he is battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer along with more than 50,000 other Americans that will be diagnosed this year. According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer accounts for only 3.2% of all cancers and 7.2% of all cancer deaths. It's very hard to detect early as the pancreas is deep in the body and symptoms appear after the cancer is very large and has spread to other organs.
"Because we find it so late in the game people are usually very very sick. To put it in perspective, over 220,000 women in the United States were diagnosed with breast cancer last year but only 40,000 died. For pancreatic cancer, 55,000 people were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and over 45,000 people died so it's got an 80% mortality rate in the first year," explained Jennifer Hatton, oncologist at Lima Memorial Health System.
Some factors that may increase a person's chance of getting pancreatic cancer are smoking or other tobacco use, type 2 diabetes, obesity, being of African American ethnicity, and being 55 years of age or older.
