World Pancreatic Cancer Day – Would You See It Coming?

Today is World Pancreatic Cancer Day and being Friday the 13th charity Pancreatic Cancer Action has put together a powerful, scary movie trailer to help bring awareness to this disease.

The aim of the video is to raise widespread awareness of pancreatic cancer and its symptoms, to try and increase the number of people diagnosed at an early stage and in time for life-saving surgery.

Every day, 24 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and most will die within 4 to 6 months.  While survival rates of many cancers have improved significantly over 40 years, the shockingly low survival rate of 4% of this disease has not changed at all.

Ali Stunt, chief executive at Pancreatic Cancer Action and rare survivor of pancreatic cancer, said:

“Due to a chronic lack of awareness, people are often diagnosed too late for surgery, which is currently the only cure. We must ensure more people are diagnosed at an early stage to give them the best possible chance of recovery.”

Some statistics around pancreatic cancer are:

The Facts:

• Just 4% of patients survive – is has the worst survival rate of all 22 common cancers
• Pancreatic cancer is the fifth biggest cancer killer – 24 people die each day
• It receives just 1% of overall cancer research funding
• Pancreatic cancer affects men and women equally
• For those diagnosed in time for surgery their chance of survival increases tenfold

Statistics:

• In 2012, 8,888 people were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
• In 2011, 8,662 people died from pancreatic cancer in the UK  (( Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit; ISD Scotland Cancer Mortality in Scotland (2012);Northern Ireland Cancer Registry Cancer Statistics, Pancreas http://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/nicr/CancerData/OnlineStatistics/Pancreas/;Deaths registered in England and Wales in 2012 by cause ))

Five-year survival is only four per cent. This figure has not improved significantly in over forty years

• Relative survival to one year is less than 20% and the UK has one of the worst rates in Europe
• 24 people a day die from pancreatic cancer
• Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in the UK
• Pancreatic cancer receives only one per cent of overall research funding
• Only 10% of patients are eligible for potentially curative surgery due to late diagnosis
• Patients able to have surgery to remove the tumour have up to a 30 per cent chance of surviving five years
• Nearly half of people are diagnosed as an emergency in our A&E system
• The average life expectancy on diagnosis is four to six months
• It is the UK’s ninth most common cancer.

Pancreatic Cancer Action is committed working towards earlier diagnosis.  The charity is focused on educating the public and medical community as well as funding research.  They also campaign for more funding from the government into research, which currently stands at only 1.4 per cent of all research funding.

I think you’ll agree that these statistics are pretty shocking especially in this day in age where we’re seeing improvements in other types of cancers treated.

For more information, visit www.pancreaticcanceraction.org