Warning Signs of Pancreatic Cancer and Advances in Treatment

Survival rates have risen, and there are new treatments, but early diagnosis is key

Cheryl Platzman Weinstock and Rachel Nania,

Updated April 06, 2026

AARP

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Published February 04, 2022

/ Updated April 06, 2026

Key takeaways

Pancreatic cancer survival has more than doubled over the past 20 years.
Targeted therapies, including drugs aimed at a gene mutation often found in people with pancreatic cancer, are showing promise in clinical trials.
AI tools, blood tests and vaccines are being studied to catch disease sooner and prevent recurrence.

Twenty years ago, getting a pancreatic cancer diagnosis was often devastating. The cancer usually wasn’t caught until the later stages, partly because the pancreas is tucked behind the stomach, making it hard to detect tumors. Plus, many of the warning signs — abdominal discomfort, back pain, unintended weight loss and fatigue — are easy to overlook or write off as something else entirely, and they often arise in later stages of the disease.

“[Pancreatic cancer] almost sits silently in the body, and then it shows up when it’s advanced,” says Dr. Shubham Pant, a professor in the gastrointestinal medical oncology department at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Today, however, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has more than doubled from where it was two decades ago. If the disease is caught early, and the tumor is small and confined to the pancreas, as is the case in about 16 percent of diagnoses, the survival rate is around 44 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.

8 Warning Signs of Pancreatic Cancer

An estimated 67,530 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2026, according to the latest report from the American Cancer Society. Here are some common symptoms:

Abdominal discomfort in the mid- to- upper abdomen that often radiates to the back
New-onset diabetes or worsening blood sugar levels, especially with weight loss
Darkening of urine and lightening of stool
Jaundice (yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes)
Itching
Nausea and vomiting
Fatigue
Loss of appetite and unintentional weight loss

Treatment is more likely to be effective the sooner the cancer is caught.

Several recent medical advances have helped prolong the lives of many people with pancreatic cancer, says Dr. Brian Wolpin, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Pancreas and Biliary Tumor Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Systemic treatments, like chemotherapy, have improved, and radiation delivery has become more precise, he says. And breakthroughs in targeted therapies are generating “major excitement in the field,” Wolpin says.

Here’s a look at some of the latest progress in pancreatic cancer research and treatment.

Advances in detection and treatment

The great promise of targeted therapy

Researchers are learning more about unique changes in pancreatic cancer cells that help them grow and are developing treatments to target these changes. These medications are known as targeted therapies.

“When you talk about targeted therapy, it’s on the assumption that there’s a specific molecular alteration — whether a gene mutation or a protein overexpression — that is an Achilles’ heel for that cancer and is something that’s very actively driving that cancer,” says Dr. Michael Pishvaian, director of Gastrointestinal, Developmental Therapeutics and Clinical Research Programs for the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. “And by shutting down its activity, usually with a drug, then you can significantly impede or reverse the growth of the cancer.”

Researchers have identified a number of targets in pancreatic cancer; a big one is a mutation on the KRAS gene, which is present in the vast majority of pancreatic cancer cases. Pishvaian says “an absolute tidal wave of new therapies” targeting KRAS has emerged, and early data show promising results.

Pant explains that these experimental therapies — which are still in clinical trials for pancreatic cancer — work by turning the mutation off, like a light switch.

“If you have the [KRAS] mutation, the light is always turned on in your house, and you cannot turn it off because it’s stuck in the ‘on’ position,” Pant says. “So these inhibitors bind to that switch and turn it off. So just like the light would go off in your house, this mutation leads to cancer-cell death once you turn that switch off.”

Scientists are also studying whether KRAS inhibitors could stop pancreatic cancer before it starts. In a mouse study, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center targeted precancerous pancreatic lesions with KRAS inhibitors. They noticed a reduction in precancerous lesions in the mice that received the therapy and also slower tumor development. And the group of mice that received treatment before they developed pancreatic tumors survived nearly twice as long as the group of mice that were treated only after tumor development.

The researchers said they need to carefully consider how to apply these findings to human studies, but coauthor Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of the Abramson Cancer Center, said in a statement that he is “convinced” cancer interception will become the next frontier of cancer therapy.

“Pancreatic cancer has a stubbornly poor prognosis, limited treatment options and no proven screening or prevention strategies. If we can find a way to intercept it — to identify and neutralize abnormalities on their earliest steps toward malignancy — it would be a game-changer,” he said.

There is progress among other targets as well, which is why molecular testing of pancreatic cancer is crucial, doctors say.

“There’s a lot more going on now, where we’ve been able to design drugs against targets in pancreatic cancer that just didn’t have drugs before,” Wolpin says.

Using artificial intelligence to discover cancer

Early pancreatic cancer can be subtle enough that it’s missed on imaging scans 30 percent of the time, which means that about half of all cases aren’t caught until the later stages.

“We should be able to do better,” says Dr. Elliot Fishman, professor of radiology and radiological science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. To his point, he’s been using artificial intelligence (AI) to train the computer to read CT scans and detect tumors at earlier, smaller stages so they can be surgically removed. Fishman had screened several thousand pancreatic cancer patients with the technology and has detected tumors with a high degree of accuracy.

Researchers are using AI in other ways, as well. “Early pancreatic cancers affect the normal body in many ways, and there may be ways you can see differences in the liver or in the spleen or other areas of the body that might again give you a sense of elevated risk for the disease,” Wolpin says. “So I think work is expanding beyond just looking at the pancreas.”

Scientists are also studying how AI could help predict a person’s pancreatic cancer risk by reading their medical records, Wolpin adds.

Using blood tests to detect pancreatic cancer early

As for many other cancers, a simple urine or blood test may one day be used to screen for early-stage pancreatic cancer, since body fluids contain fragments of tumor-cell DNA.

Scientists have made progress on these tests in recent years, but none are available yet, and Pant says it could still be a few years before we get a screening test for pancreatic cancer.

Exploring a vaccine for pancreatic cancer

In a small but important clinical trial published in 2023 in the journal Nature, a research team from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that a personalized mRNA vaccine prevented the most common type of pancreatic cancer from recurring in about half the study participants. The trial is ongoing.

“It’s exciting to see that a personalized vaccine could enlist the immune system to fight pancreatic cancer, which urgently needs better treatments,” study coauthor Dr. Vinod Balachandran, a surgical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said in a news release. “It’s also motivating as we may be able to use such personalized vaccines to treat other deadly cancers.”

Know — and lower — your risk factors for pancreatic cancer

“Increasing awareness of the risk factors associated with pancreatic cancer development — such as having a family history of pancreatic cancer, having a pancreas cyst on a CT or MRI scan or developing new-onset diabetes — offers the opportunity for us to diagnose pancreatic cancer early and intervene, with the overall hope of improving patient outcome overall,” says Dr. James Farrell, director of the Yale Center for Pancreatic Diseases at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital.

You can lower your risk for pancreatic cancer by changing unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, such as smoking, drinking alcohol and being overweight.

About 25 percent of pancreatic cancers are thought to be caused by cigarette smoking. Cigar smoking and using smokeless tobacco raise your risk too, according to the American Cancer Society.
People who have obesity (BMI of 30 or higher) are about 20 percent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Type 2 diabetes is more common among overweight adults than in adults of optimal weight, and this condition also raises the risk for pancreatic cancer, especially in those over 50 who suddenly develop type 2 diabetes without having a family history of it, Dana-Farber’s Wolpin says.
Drinking alcohol can lead to chronic pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas, which has been linked to an increase in pancreatic cancer.

Certain risk factors for pancreatic cancer can’t be changed, but they’re important to know. If you have any of the following, you should share it with your doctor.

Some pancreatic cancers are thought to be genetic. If you have a family history of the disease, talk with your doctor about whether you should be screened.
A family history of other cancers and syndromes can also raise your risk for pancreatic cancer. These include hereditary breast and ovarian cancer caused by BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, and Lynch syndrome, an inherited disorder associated with colon cancer.

Other risk factors include age, gender and race. Men develop pancreatic cancer slightly more often than women. The risk of developing it increases with age. What’s more, African Americans are more likely to get pancreatic cancer than any other racial group.

Editor’s Note: This story, originally published on Feb. 4, 2022, was updated with new information on April 6, 2026.

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Cheryl Platzman Weinstock is a contributing writer who covers health and science research and its impact on society. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Rachel Nania is an award-winning health editor and writer at AARP.org, who covers a range of topics including diseases and treatments.

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