What is pancreatic tail cancer?

  Pancreatic tail cancer is a kind of digestive system tumor with insidious onset, rapid progression, poor prognosis and high malignancy, and its incidence is increasing year by year worldwide.  Clinical manifestations: Early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer has always been a difficult problem for surgeons, because of the deep location of the pancreas, pancreatic cancer lacks typical clinical manifestations in early stages, especially in pancreatic body tail cancer. The early non-specific symptoms such as upper abdominal discomfort, lethargy, poor appetite and abdominal distension are often diagnosed as other diseases such as gastritis and the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is neglected, and a considerable number of patients are not diagnosed in time even if they have obvious abdominal pain.  Diagnosis: Clinical practice has confirmed that the combined application of ultrasound, CT, MRI, can diagnose pancreatic tumors of 1 cm in diameter, and for cases that are difficult to diagnose, fine-needle aspiration under ultrasound guidance is feasible. Because of the difficulty in early diagnosis, medical and biological workers have been searching for tumor markers specific for pancreatic cancer, but no indicator with high specificity as methemoglobin in the diagnosis of hepatocellular liver cancer has been found. So far, CA199 and CEA have played a more positive role in the early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and the seropositivity rate in our group of patients reached nearly 90% when combined with the test. Early examination of serum CA199 and CEA in patients with suspected pancreatic cancer is advisable to facilitate early detection of pancreatic body tail cancer.  Treatment: Because of the rapid development of the disease, most of the patients are already in advanced stage when they have obvious abdominal pain and back pain and lose the chance of radical surgery, so the possibility of obtaining radical resection is less than 20% and the overall 5-year survival rate is less than 5%. The overall 5-year survival rate is less than 5%. Since the efficacy of radiotherapy and chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer is not satisfactory, surgery to remove the tumor is the only way for patients to achieve long-term survival. However, in the past, it was often impossible to cure the tumor because it had already invaded the main blood vessels and surrounding organs such as the celiac trunk, superior mesenteric artery and superior mesenteric vein at the time of diagnosis. Numerous studies have shown that the median survival of the radical tumor resection group is significantly longer than that of the unresected group, and even if palliative resection is performed in cases where radical resection is not possible, the survival time is significantly better than that of the unresected group. Therefore, we believe that if there is no distant metastasis, even if the tumor invades multiple organs, combined organ resection should be actively pursued.  Features of our department: At present, our department utilizes the concept of precision surgery and performs combined upper left abdominal organ resection, abdominal stem resection and retroperitoneal lymph node dissection for patients through preoperative determination and careful surgical planning.  A patient, female, 72 years old, was admitted to our department. She had been suffering from abdominal distension for several months and black stool for 2 weeks. Gastroscopy revealed a huge bulging ulcerated lesion in the posterior wall of the gastric body with an extent of about 6-8 cm, and CT examination revealed a huge tumor in the caudal part of the pancreatic body invading the gastric wall, multiple enlarged lymph nodes adjacent to the abdominal aorta, splenic artery and vein involvement, and regional portal hypertension. We performed pancreatic body caudal + splenectomy + total gastrectomy + esophage-jejunum Roux-en-Y anastomosis for the patient. The tumor invaded the posterior wall of the gastric body and penetrated into the gastric cavity, forming an ulcerated surface of 6 cm in diameter. The tumor invaded the superior mesenteric vein, splenic vein and inferior mesenteric vein, invaded the beginning of the abdominal trunk, wrapped around from the beginning of the splenic artery and spread to the foot of the diaphragm and the beginning of the jejunum, and involved the transverse colonic mesentery. A 2 cm diameter enlarged lymph node was seen under the left renal vein. Intraoperative bleeding did not exceed 200 ml, and such advanced pancreatic cancer could not be resected radically before.