[Comprehensive guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer (2018 version)]

Pancreatic cancer ranks the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death, while the incidence has increased in the recent years.Although available diagnosis and treatment have failed to significantly improve patients' outcome, some advances have been made along with the understanding of the new concepts from oncology over the past several years.Pancreatic Cancer Committee of Chinese Anti-Cancer Association worked out this latest edition of "The Clinical Practice Guidelines for Pancreatic Cancer(version 2018)" based on current situation to standardize and improve the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer in China.This guideline shows algorithms for the diagnosis involving classification and staging, the systematic treatment including surgical resection, systemic chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and the whole-course management model for patients with pancreatic cancer.Different from previous consensus, this guideline contains the discussions and recommendations of 19 hot-issues in the clinical practice for pancreatic cancer in a question-oriented form, such as selection of biopsy and specimen sites, clinical diagnostic criteria for pancreatic cancer, assessment of resectable pancreatic cancer, indications and methods of preoperative biliary drainage, application of laparoscopic surgery, effect of expanding resection on patients' outcomes, dissection of group 16(th) lymph node in standard pancreaticoduodenectomy, prognostic value of serum tumor markers, and neoadjuvant therapy in patients with resectable pancreatic cancer, etc.This guideline aims to raise a better comprehensive understanding of the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer for specialists, and further improving and standardizing the clinical practice in different medical institutions.