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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I've known > 10 people who have died from this cancer. It is my #1 fear (cancer wise). My best friend died 3 months to the day after being diagnosed. It is both a blessing and a curse how quickly this kills you. The day before he found out we went on a long walk. Within a couple of weeks we'd walk around the block, then just sit in his living room and talk for hours. The bad times lasted about 1 week and the last 2-3 days he was not really there.

I really hope this test becomes a reality and is OTC and not too expensive.

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Just lost my father to pancreatic cancer as well a couple weeks ago. They caught it very early with a CT scan, performed a significant surgery followed by radiation and chemo. The chemo nearly killed him. Had a couple ok months after chemo, but then it spread and the last couple weeks were awful. Even catching this stupid cancer really early often isn't enough - I hate it.

just a hunch, but if you can detect it via CT or MRI isn't it already too late? I guess these blood tests can detect it even earlier an then the prognosis could be significally better

Not necessarily but that's the idea. Tumors will start shedding cells into the bloodstream as they start forming. These types of tests are able to identify tumor cells in a blood draw.

It's good that people are focusing on detecting such things early but unfortunately the management of any cancer basically falls into two categories - burn it or remove it. Burning maybe done via radiation, chemo etc. And treating liquid malignancies is even difficult.

I lost my absolutely fit and fine father last year to AML. I couldn't do jack shit about it and have this lingering feeling of how archiac the whole medical science - especially the drug discovery is.

No one in medical field is interested to cure any disease. All want to manage it so that pharma can get as many "subscribers" as possible to keep that money flowing in.

And such novel tests is just another mechanism to enroll new subscribers early in the journey to earn money for some more months. That's all.

> No one in medical field is interested to cure any disease. All want to manage it so that pharma can get as many "subscribers" as possible to keep that money flowing in.

I can assure you this is absolutely, 100% false. *Maybe* at the highest, corporate levels. I've never been privy to that level of discourse. I have however spent a lot of time working with the boots on the ground. Never have I come across a single one who intentionally avoided "a cure".

> No one in medical field is interested to cure any disease. All want to manage it so that pharma can get as many "subscribers" as possible to keep that money flowing in.

Care to support such outrageous claims with actual evidence or?

I was going to ask about this number, because it seems high enough to be statistically improbable, but back-of-the-envelope arithmetic says otherwise: there are about 10 cases of pancreatic cancer per 100,000 people per year [1], so let's say each person has a 1 in 10,000 chance of a diagnosis each year. If you know somebody for 50 years, there's a 1 in 200 chance they receive a diagnosis in that time, so you'd expect to need to know 2000 people to eventually know 10 diagnosed people. 2000 is a lot, but "knowing" a person is a pretty loose term, and pancreatic cancer has a miserably high death rate within 5 years, so it's unfortunately plausible.

[1] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/pancreas.html

The number of people you know who have or die of cancer grows exponentially with age once you are an adult.

In 20s-early 30s, maybe 0 if your parents/uncles/aunts are lucky. You can be completely oblivious to it if your older relatives manage to escape it.

By 40 you start hearing about friends having it pretty routinely. We seem to have hit a one close friend per year pace at the moment.

Every time I talk to my 70+ parents, they are telling me about a funeral they've been to recently, often caused by either cancer or heart disease.

if you take the 1/200 chance over 50 years, here is the percent chance you know 10 diagnoses depending on your number of friends/acquaintances

50 people: 8.36149e-12 %

500 people: 0.026%

1000 people 3.1%

2000 people: 50%

This is people I know or my family knows. My mother knows 4-5 people. I've had 2 coworkers die of it. I've had 1 in-law die of it. It's crazy how fast the numbers add up.

Keep in mind that there could be clusters of cases related to environmental contamination so it's very possible that some people know more people who get a particular form of cancer.

My best friend died of pancreatic cancer at 41. By the time he received the diagnosis, it was too late. The cancer had metastasized so extensively that the surgeons could do nothing when they attempted to operate. What began as mild lower back pain led to a slow and agonizing death in just a few months.

That's exactly what happened to my friend's father. He had been complaining about lower back pain for many months and going to physio for it. During a family re-union during Christmas, he had to be hospitalized and got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. One week later, he died.

How generic these symptoms are! I always wonder if medical science has really attempted to study these diseases to understand their unique symptoms.

I lost my dad at age 62 last year to AML. His generic symptom was weakness.

I signed in just to upvote this. I've lost friends and relatives to this. I couldn't agree more that I fear this cancer more than any other- because it is so untreatable by the time it's caught. An inexpensive test would be incredibly helpful towards improving the survivability.

I'm so sorry for your loss. Could you share how old they were ? I'm relatively young, but the fear of getting some form of cancer is on my mind lately. And the timing of it always seems to be so cruel.

He was 76 and in really good health. Worked out regularly. Ate well.

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