The incidence of age-adjusted pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) rose annually by 6.7% from 1995 to 2007 and by 13.4% from 2008 to 2014 (P < .05) among patients across the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result (SEER) registries following revisions in 2000 and 2010 to the way NETs are characterized.
Because pancreatic NETs generally have a much better prognosis than other cancers of the pancreas, their inclusion in the same category as the other pancreatic cancers — namely, in the same group as pancreatic adenocarcinomas — may mean that calculation of the survival rate for pancreatic cancer of any type could be skewed.
The 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer from 2008 to 2014 was 9.1%, but declined by 43% to 5.4% when NET cases began being excluded from the official count for pancreatic cancers. By lumping NET cases in with all types of cancer of the pancreas, the 5-year rate of survival rate shot up regardless of the presence of other potentially confounding patient-specific parameters such as age, sex, stage, and year of pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
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The researchers acknowledged that while survival rates for pancreatic cancer are improving, “changes in NET classification and reporting artifactually increases SEER-reported survival. Given the divergent biology of NET and non-NET pancreas cancer, separate reporting of survival seems warranted.”1
Reference
- Mandelson M, Massman JD, Picozzi VJ, Mason V. Impact of neuroendocrine tumor classification on pancreas cancer survival rates in the United States, 1995-2014. Presented at: AACR Pancreatic Cancer: Advances in Science and Clinical Care conference; Boston, Massachusetts: September 21-24, 2018. Abstract A071.
