Journal of Surgery

Survival Prediction for Romanian Patients with Pancreatic Cancer

Abstract

Daniel Timofte, Mihaela Blaj, Florin Petrariu, Lidia Ionescu and Lăcrămioara Ochiuz

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal malignancies worldwide and in some of the latest statistics ranks fourth in the total number of deaths related to cancer in patients of both genders. Currently, curative treatment is only possible in cases of resectable disease and during the initial stages. Still, although complete surgical resection is the only potential curative approach of this disease, it can only be performed in 10 to 20% of patients, since most individuals present with advanced disease upon diagnosis. Moreover, in the recent decades the development and improvement of surgical techniques have only improved postoperative mortality, without having any significant impact on the survival, with specialized pancreatic surgery centres reporting mortality below 5%. In this way, in the present study conducted on 188 patients from the “St. Spiridon” Clinical Emergency Hospital Iasi, we were interested in determining the survival rates in pancreatic cancer, as well as looking at the staging criteria for adenocarcinoma of the pancreas that follows the tumor/node/metastasis (TNM) system and the correlations between any of these stages and the overall survival. Weibull distribution was used to estimate the overall survival. Reduced survival in pancreatic cancer was found to be within the limits found in the published literature: 41.7% at 1 year, 8.7% at 3 years and 1.9% at 5 years. Still, no significant correlation was found between any of the disease stages and the overall survival.