Why does pancreatic cancer often hit so hard and usually kill its victims so quickly?

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Pancreatic cancer.

When news of this type of diagnosis is mentioned, those two words strike fear and dread in most every adult…That, of course, is because pancreatic cancer is the most aggressive, least treatable form of the disease and in a large majority of cases it reduces the victim’s life expectancy to a matter of months.

Why is this type of cancer so ravenous and what makes it accelerate so rapidly? German researchers say they have discovered the answer to this question, and they’ve traced the cancer’s aggressiveness to a key factor in its earliest growth and composition.

The factor is called Zeb1, which “controls how cells migrate and survive in early embryonic development.” What that basically means is that Zeb1 acts like a switch, that, when on, powers the cells of the tumor to “quickly adapt to the changing conditions in their new environment,” according to a statement from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg…From there, the cells metastasize quickly, producing deadly results.

In the rarer cases when pancreatic cancer is slower moving and relatively less aggressive, researchers believe that Zeb1 is switched off, producing “significantly lower metastatic capacity” and a longer period of survivability.

[Read the original source here]

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Doctors Discover Why Pancreatic Cancer Kills So Quickly

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia

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