The American Cancer Society estimates that about 67,440 Americans (34,950 men and 32,490 women) will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. Of those, about 51,980 people (27,050 men and 24,930 women) will die of pancreatic cancer. The lifetime risk of pancreatic cancer is about 1 in 56 in men and about 1 in 60 in women.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the more deadly forms of this malady because around 80 percent of patients will be diagnosed at Stage IV, which is after the cancer has metastasized throughout the body. Stage IV pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 1 percent. Overall, the five-year survival rate of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is 13 percent. If the disease is caught very early, up to 10 percent of patients become disease-free.
Compare those grim statistics with the overall five-year survival rates for breast and prostate cancers (91 percent and 97 percent, respectively).
