A new tool has been validated that could facilitate the early detection of pancreatic cancer, one of the most aggressive and difficult-to-diagnose tumors. The research team, with a prominent role played by the PADO (Pancreatic Cancer Assessment Program), developed the tool, the statistical analysis, and the integration of epidemiological data. The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology, has verified a scoring system based on 24 epidemiological factors that allows for the identification of individuals at higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer.
The work focused on individuals with a high familial risk of developing this disease and was validated using data from nearly 300,000 participants in the UK Biobank. The results show that individuals with higher scores were more likely to have suspicious lesions detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Therefore, strategies like this can be particularly useful for focusing efforts on high-risk groups.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42160519/