By Orlando Sentinel

Published: Monday, December 10, 2012, 12:01 a.m.
Updated: Monday, December 10, 2012

Almost always deadly and steadily on the rise, pancreatic cancer is on track to become the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the nation within the next two years, according to a recent report.

Currently the fourth-leading cancer killer — and the reason behind the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs at 56 — pancreatic cancer will likely surpass breast, prostate and colorectal cancers to rank behind only lung cancer, the No. 1 cancer killer, said the report from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.

The higher ranking is partly because risk factors associated with pancreatic cancer are trending up, while deaths from the other top cancer killers are trending down, said Dr. Bose Debashish, a pancreatic cancer surgeon at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Orlando, Fla.

The incidence of pancreatic cancer has been rising 1.5 percent each year since 2004, according to the American Cancer Society. At the current rate, one in every 71 Americans will develop the disease in his or her lifetime.

One of the risk factors fueling the upward trend is Americans' lengthening life spans. Nearly 90 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are older than 55, and more than 70 percent are older than 65, according to the cancer society.

Increasing rates of obesity and diabetes have contributed to the trend, Debashish said, as has smoking, which doubles or triples the risk.

What distinguishes this killer is that it's the only top cancer with a survival rate in the single digits: Just 6 percent of those who are diagnosed with it are alive in five years.

“Everyone who gets pancreatic cancer will likely die of it,” Debashish said.

By the time the cancer presents with symptoms, he said, 85 percent of patients are not candidates for surgical correction.

Complicating treatment further, tumors in the pancreas — an essential organ responsible for producing insulin and aiding digestion — don't respond well to available chemotherapy agents.

Symptoms of pancreatic cancer include jaundice (which causes the skin to turn yellow), dark urine, a chalky stool, pain in the abdomen above the navel and unexplained weight loss, Debashish said.

Some astute physicians spot the disease when a normal-weight patient develops sudden-onset diabetes, he said.

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