Detectable Symptomatology Preceding the Diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer and Absolute Risk of Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis

The survival duration for pancreatic cancer is short. Given its low lifetime risk (1.5%), established factors for the disease have insufficient specificity to identify individuals at high risk of nonfamilial cancer, and prediagnostic signs and symptoms are vague and not limited to pancreatic causes. We considered whether statistical models that incorporated both risk factors and prediagnosis symptomatology could improve prediction enough to provide practical risk estimates. We combined US Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) incidence data from 2008 to 2010 with regression models from representative case-control data from Connecticut (2005-2009) to estimate age- and sex-specific 5-year absolute risks of pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Our risk model included current cigarette smoking (adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 3.3, 95% confidence interval (CI): 2.1, 5.0), current use of proton pump-inhibitor antiheartburn medications (OR = 6.2, 95% CI: 1.7, 23), recent diagnosis of diabetes mellitus (OR = 4.8, 95% CI: 2.2, 11), recent diagnosis of pancreatitis (OR = 19, 95% CI: 3.1, 120), Jewish ancestry (OR = 1.8, 95% CI: 1.1, 3.1), and ABO blood group other than O (OR = 1.3, 95% CI: 1.0, 1.8). In total, 0.87% of controls with combinations of these factors had estimated 5-year absolute risks greater than 5%, and for some, the risks reached more than 10%. Combining risk factors for pancreatic cancer with detectable prediagnostic symptomatology can allow investigators to begin to identify small segments of the population with risks sufficiently high enough to make screening efforts among them potentially useful.