Raising Awareness & Advocating
- Actress Mindy Kaling, 41, is raising awareness and advocating for research about pancreatic cancer after losing her mother to the disease eight years ago.
- Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult types of cancers to successfully treat.
- Symptoms often don’t present themselves until the cancer has spread throughout the body, and screening for the disease can be difficult.
“I’m standing here today, with my mom in spirit, to continue her fight by advocating and supporting research that advances early detection and treatments for pancreatic cancer patients and their families,” Kaling says about her decision to team up with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) as a brand ambassador.
Read MoreAs a mother to 2 year-old daughter Katherine and 3-month-old son Spencer, Kaling knows how important motherly love can be during tough moments. After her mother’s passing, Kaling still honors her memory through special Mother’s Day tributes on social media.
“I think it would make my mother so happy to know that I'm doing something to help other families who are going through what my family went through because it was the greatest trial of our lives,” Kaling tells PanCAN.
Why is Pancreatic Cancer Caught Late?
Kaling’s mother’s experience of being diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer is more common than one may assume. In fact, according to Dr. Anirban Maitra, co-leader of the Pancreatic Cancer Moon Shot at MD Anderson Cancer Center, 80% of pancreatic cancer cases are diagnosed in late stages.
“By the time individuals walk into the clinic with symptoms like jaundice, weight loss, back pain, or diabetes, it’s often very late in the stage of the disease,” Dr. Maitra told SurvivorNet in a previous interview. “Each year in the United States, about 53,000 patients get pancreatic cancer, and unfortunately most will die from this disease within a few months to a year or so from the diagnosis.”
In addition to late symptoms, it’s also extremely difficult to successfully screen for the disease. This is because the pancreas is located deep inside the body. “Because the pancreas is inside the abdomen, it often doesn't have symptoms that would tell you that something is wrong with your pancreas," Dr. Maitra said.
Dr. Anirban Maitra breaks down the challenges of detecting pancreatic cancer
Why is Pancreatic Cancer So Hard to Treat?
Pancreatic cancer is known as one of the most difficult types of cancers to successful treat. Currently, the one-year-survival rate for a person battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer is 20% and the five-year-survival rate is just 9%. Seeing as many cases of the disease are caught in advanced stages, this can limit treatment options. However, there’s another problem facing those going through treatment medication has a difficult time penetrating the cancer.
The obstacle facing medication from targeting cancer cells is due to the stroma a barrier around cancer cells which prevents medications, such as chemotherapy and radiation, from eliminating them. This makes targeting and kill cancer cells extremely difficult, which means the disease can progress into later stages and spread throughout the body.
"Think of pancreatic cancer as an oatmeal raisin cookie and the raisins are actually the cancer cells, and the cookie part is actually all the stroma around it," Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview. "And imagine having to navigate through all that stroma for a treatment to be able to get into a cell to kill it. So that's why the treatments just really aren't good enough to penetrate the cancer. But we're improving, we're getting better treatments."
Dr. Allyson Ocean explains why pancreatic cancer is so difficult to treat
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