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Chemotherapy

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Pancreatic Masses

Abstract

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma represents the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States, with most patients diagnosed with advanced disease or a recurrence shortly after a surgical attempt at cure. Overall only 5% of diagnosed patients are alive at 5 years. The last decade has seen an explosion of effort to bring new and effective therapies to the clinic. This is despite the paucity of success in the preceding decades with disappointing clinical research. Recent encouraging results from clinical trials assessing combination chemotherapy in pancreatic adenocarcinoma including FOLFIRINOX, gemcitabine with nab-paclitaxel, and gemcitabine with erlotinib have met primary endpoints for overall survival improvement. Bringing these therapies into earlier phases of care represent priorities of ongoing clinical research. Similar to pancreatic adenocarcinoma, pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors have recently seen a significant number of effective systemic therapies. These treatments, including octreotide, chemotherapy, and targeted therapies, provide patients meaningful symptom and disease control. This chapter will review these contemporary study results, in the context of historical data, which support these improvements in clinical care for both pancreatic adenocarcinoma and neuroendocrine tumors.

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Correspondence to Thomas J. George Jr. M.D., F.A.C.P. .

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Sliesoraitis, S., George, T.J. (2016). Chemotherapy. In: Wagh, M., Draganov, P. (eds) Pancreatic Masses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19677-0_19

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