Pancreatic cancer symptoms can hide in plain sight, even when the CT scan looks normal.
This story from hospital rounds at Brown shows how one persistent spouse changed the entire outcome.
The patient had painless jaundice, a classic warning sign for pancreatic adenocarcinoma in the head of the pancreas.
The first CAT scan did not show a mass.
Additional imaging still did not give an answer.
But his wife kept pushing for an abdominal MRI.
That one decision revealed a tiny head-of-pancreas tumor that everything else missed.
A biopsy confirmed pancreatic cancer.
And the diagnosis came at stage one, which is exactly when treatment has the best chance to help.
If your symptoms keep nagging at you, what would make you push for one more test?
Internal medicine physician Earl Stewart, Jr. discusses his article "Pancreatic cancer racial disparities."
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