considerations on the incidence of pancreatic cancer

Comprehensive histopathological evaluations of the pancrease in autopsy material revealed a remarkably high (10%) incidence of neoplastic pancreatic lesions. The fact that many malignant pancreatic lesions apparently remained clinically occult may be due to attribution of the death of patients to other malignancies. The differential diagnostic difficulties encountered in primary and secondary pancreatic cancer which are reported in the literature comprise additional factors that obviously mask real incidence figures of pancreatic cancer. The multiplicity of lesions found in this, and in previous studies, may be one reason for the extremely poor prognosis associated with this disease.