Author Archives: pancreatica

Interesting research over recent years into risk factors for ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas have yielded the usual suspects – and a number of somewhat surprising candidates for pancreatic cancer. These include the smoking of tobacco products, onset of diabetes, large intake of alcohol, pancreatitis, (possibly) obesity, ABO blood typing status, and even infections such […]

There are few hard and fast rules for the medical treatment of patients with metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. Two agents which have shown promise include everolimus (Afinitor ~ Novartis) and temozolomide (Temodar ~ Merck). An article by Kulke and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and the associated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston as published in […]

One of the great pleasures of doing worldwide reviews of the medical literature on pancreatic cancer is encountering the obscure, deep background, early and even unusual research on the topic. I think that the following study must fit into one or more of these categories ! Nishino and colleagues of the College of Pharmacy and […]

The issue of offering combination treatment with radiation and chemotherapy AFTER pancreatic cancer surgery (for ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas) to improve survival has been in place based on the classic August, 1985 study by the (U.S.) Gastrointestinal Tumor Study Group under Kalser and Ellenberg published in the Archives of Surgery. These findings appear to […]

A long friend to the mission of our foundation, Al Laporta, DDS of New Your (who lost his beloved mother to pancreatic cancer) reminds us of intriguing work by physician and dentist researchers at UCLA demonstrating proof of concept work published in 2010 in the journal Gastroenterology which identified 12 salivary messenger RNA biomarkers that […]