Muscle and fat loss may offer clues to pancreatic cancer’s deadly ways
Muscle and fat loss might offer clues to understanding pancreatic cancer and diagnosing it earlier, a new study suggests.
Of all the places to get cancer, the pancreas may be the worst. Difficult to detect and nearly impossible to treat, pancreatic cancer is the only major cancer with a five-year survival rate below 10 percent. New research, published Wednesday in Nature, challenges some widely held assumptions about the disease and could eventually help doctors diagnose patients earlier, when treatments are most effective.
The study’s findings came from investigating how early pancreatic tumors affect peripheral tissues — mainly muscle and fat — in both mice and humans.
Doctors have long observed that many pancreatic cancer patients experience debilitating tissue wasting. Researchers have been working to stop or even reverse such loss, although they still
