Pancreatic cancer: management and survival

To review the management and survival from all pancreatic cancer over a 5-year period at a tertiary referral hospital in New Zealand and to examine similar outcome data from the national cancer registry.

A retrospective audit was conducted for the 5-year period 1994-99 of patients discharged from Christchurch Hospital (Christchurch, New Zealand) and all patients in the New Zealand Cancer Registry with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Kaplan- Meier survival curves were used for analysis.

From Christchurch Hospital a total of 230 patients were identified with a discharge diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Medium survival for all groups was 3.9 months. There was a median survival of 1.6 months for the non-interventional group, 3.1 months for the stent group, 6.2 months for the bypass group and 12.6 months for the pancreatico-duodenectomy group. These data are very similar to the New Zealand National Cancer Registry data, where the overall median survival was 3.1 months and median survival for a pancreatico-duodenectomy was 13.9 months.

A pancreatico-duodenectomy is usually a palliative surgical technique and not a curative procedure. Those selected for resection have been shown to have an advantage over operative bypass in terms of length of survival, however, this most likely reflects selection bias.