Alex Trebek is best known for hosting the popular TV game show “Jeopardy!” for the past 35 years. But with his announcement this week that he has Stage IV pancreatic cancer, Trebek can do a world of good by becoming the face of a disease that has the highest mortality rate of all cancers.
Trebek told his viewers that he’s determined to beat the odds. The grim statistics indicate this will be quite a challenge.
The National Cancer Institute reports that only 9 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are still living five years after their diagnosis. To put it another way, 91 percent of those with the disease die within five years. An oncologist told The Washington Post that up to 50 percent die within a year of diagnosis.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the few forms of the disease whose survival rate has not improved noticeably in recent years. The Post said the overall cancer mortality rate has fallen by 26 percent in the last two decades. Millions of lives have been saved. But the survival rate for pancreatic cancer has not budged.
The disease is now the third-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, having overtaken breast cancer in 2016. It is expected to move into second place by 2020, overtaking colon cancer. (Lung cancer is far and away the leader on this depressing list.)
The website pancreatic.org, run by the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, predicts that 56,770 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year and nearly 46,000 will die from the disease.
There are two reasons that pancreatic cancer deaths have not decreased.
One is that there’s no simple detection test, such as a mammogram for breast cancer. The other is that in almost all cases, by the time the cancer is discovered, it has reached the two most serious levels of Stage III or IV, and the only treatments available are chemotherapy or radiation. If — or hopefully when — detection improves and allows earlier removal of the tumor, the survival rate is bound to increase.
For anyone interested, the pancreatic.org website has information on symptoms that can be an early signal of the disease, such as abdominal pain, weight loss and jaundice. The site also discusses risk factors: Smokers are twice as likely to develop pancreatic cancer, for example.
Meanwhile, pancreatic cancer researchers and patients are bound to have an outstanding advocate in Trebek. He could, for example, lead the way in increasing public awareness of pancreatic cancer, acting as a fundraiser for whatever research is required to develop a mammogram-type test that could provide early detection of a problem with the pancreas.
Trebek’s friends spoke optimistically about the bad news, saying they believe he can beat this disease. Hopefully they are right. But if his greatest contribution is as a spokesman for those with pancreatic cancer, he will be performing a valuable public service.
Jack Ryan is editor/publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb. Reach him at publisher@enterprise-journal.com.
