It’s been nearly 30 years since beloved TV actor Michael Landon passed away from pancreatic cancer, but there’s still circling speculation as to what caused his diagnosis. While some people claim the Little House on the Prairie location might be linked, there’s still no hard evidence to prove it.
Landon passed away from pancreatic cancer when he was just 54 years old in 1991. When Landon's cancer was discovered in 1991, it had already traveled to his liver, and the actor was treated with chemotherapy, but the treatments had a very slim chance of working. Even today, the 5-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer that has spread to distant areas of the body is around 3%.
Read MoreNuclear Accidents Do Pose Health Risks
According to a October 2006 report from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory panel, the meltdown was the cause of 260 cancer-related deaths and 60% increase in cancers such as lung, bladder, kidney, liver, blood, lymph node, upper digestive track, and thyroid. However, experts point out that the Little House on the Prairie location wasn’t in extremely close proximity to the laboratory, so it’s unlikely that the meltdown caused Landon’s cancer diagnosis.
There are other instances in which nuclear accidents are believed to have significantly elevated cancer risk. It’s been over 40 years since the nuclear power disaster in Three Mile Island, but residents are claiming that the incident caused an increase in thyroid cancers that are, to this day, still rising. Despite claims, researchers at Penn State University, who looked at the effects of the Three Mile Island meltdown on thyroid cancer in the surrounding population, said in a 2017 study that there is evidence to suggest that there may be link between Three Mile Island and cancer.
Why Is Pancreatic Cancer So Difficult To Treat?
Detecting pancreatic cancer early can be a key way to help patients through treatment. The disease has a five year survival rate of just nine percent, it's vital that it's caught as early as possible. Nearly 57,000 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. Although pancreatic cancer survival rates have been improving for decades, it's still considered to be largely incurable. An exception to this is if the tumor is still small enough and localized enough to be operated on. As most pancreatic cancers are particularly aggressive and progress rapidly, catching it early is critical.
However, oftentimes the tumor is not caught in time, and the disease has advanced to later stages making it even more difficult to treat. In general, pancreatic cancer has proven to be one of the cancers that's the most difficult to treat because of the stroma which is surrounded by cancer cells and is often resistant to medication, chemotherapy, and radiation. Since it serves as a barrier against treatment, it's more difficult to kill cancer cells in the body.
Dr. Allyson Ocean explains why pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat
"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," says. Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center. "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."
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
