Every year, more than 10,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, for most of those people, the disease is diagnosed too late to be cured. Less than 10% of people live five years following a diagnosis.
Pancreatic cancer is a silent disease. For many people, it has no symptoms until it is fairly advanced. Weight loss and increased blood glucose levels are known signs, but it has been unknown – until now – when these changes occur and to what extent. If we can better understand how and when these changes happen before pancreatic cancer diagnosis, we can use this knowledge to diagnose the disease earlier and potentially, in the future, save the lives of some of the people affected by this deadly disease.
In the largest study of its kind, published in PLOS ONE, researchers at the University of Surrey, together with researchers at the University of Oxford, investigated known signs of pancreatic cancer – weight loss, high blood sugar and diabetes – and looked at when they develop in relation to cancer. To undertake this research, we used a large dataset of more than 10 million people in England. The large size of the dataset was important to ensure that our findings represent the whole population. We extracted the information on pancreatic cancer diagnosis and the three attributes of interest and investigated how they change for people over time.
