WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Screening for pancreatic cancer

Burlington, Vermont - January 5, 2012

There are mammograms to detect breast cancer, colonoscopies for colon cancer and PSA tests to help diagnose cancers of the prostate. But to date, there's no screening tool for the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States: cancer of the pancreas.

"When you develop pancreatic cancer it's almost always too late for a cure. And symptoms, when they come about, come about late in the course of the disease. So just detecting it symptomatically is not an effective way to diagnose and treat and cure this disease," said Dr. Rick Zubarik, a gastroenterologist at Fletcher Allen Health Care.

In fact, the survival rate for those presenting with symptoms is less than 5 percent.

The only hope for patients is finding it early and surgically removing the cancerous tumor. But until now, there's been no feasible way to do that-- to screen people for pancreatic cancer. However, a UVM study of high-risk patients-- those with a first-degree relative with the cancer-- is offering hope.

"So what we did was we used a blood test called the serum CA 19-9, which is a tumor marker test that is used now to check the progression of the disease-- also to prognosticate how people will do," Zubarik explained.

And those who had an elevated level of CA 19-9 then had an endoscopic ultrasound-- a total of 27 of the 546 people involved in the study.

"Of the people that we screened, five people either had premalignant or precancerous or cancerous lesions. One of those people had an early stage pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which was diagnosed by the endoscopic ultrasound and that person underwent surgery and is now alive and well four years after the surgical resection," Zubarik said.

Zubarik says that's significant because compared to those who came to Fletcher Allen with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer during the same time frame; just one patient of 124 was also in stage 1. The rest were more advanced and most likely faced a death sentence.

"It's definitely gratifying to me," Zubarik said. There's no question about that especially when I do diagnose this cancer a number of times a week and I have conversations with families regarding the prognosis and what it entails, so yes, it's a very positive thing for me."

One positive step-- a potential future screening tool for finding pancreatic cancer before it's too late.

Zubarik plans to expand his study this year with more high-risk patients both here and at other centers around the country. Researchers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock collaborated on the first phase.