Latest advances in pancreatic tumours

Pancreatic cancer continues to have a bleak prognosis. Hardly any therapeutic advances have been made in the last few years and consequently most efforts have focused on preventing its development and on diagnosing precursor lesions. In this regard, the use of statins as a preventive factor and the implementation of screening programmes in high-risk patients are gaining ground. In the field of treatment, there is greater focus on the role of neoadjuvant therapy in pancreatic cancer and on a multimodal approach to the disease, with few advances in effective novel therapies. Most studies concerned cystic tumours of the pancreas, especially intraductal mucinous papillary tumour, with its known potential for malignant transformation. Multiple studies were devoted to validation of the 2012 Fukuoka international guidelines and the highly controversial 2015 AGA guidelines. Notable among these studies were those demonstrating the suboptimal positive predictive value and questioning important aspects of the guidelines, such as discontinuation of follow-up or the criteria for surgical referral. Notable among diagnostic procedures were cystoscopy and endoscopic ultrasound-guided needle-based confocal laser endomicroscopy as the most promising techniques due to their high efficacy and negative predictive value in detecting mucinous cystic lesions. There were also a large number of studies on the natural history of intraductal papillary mucinous tumours, which help deepen knowledge of these entities and the search for predictive factors of cancer development.