JLE

Hépato-Gastro & Oncologie Digestive

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Diagnostic assessement of pancreatic cancer Volume 24, issue 8, Octobre 2017

Authors
Hôpital Beaujon, pôle des maladies de l’appareil digestif, service d’oncologie digestive, 100 boulevard Leclerc, 92110 Clichy, France
* Tirés à part

The diagnostic of pancreatic adenocarcinoma relies firstly on imaging assessment. A high quality computed tomography remains the key tool for the diagnosis but also the tumoral staging. Endoscopic ultrasonography, with recent technical improvements (ex: contrast medium injection), plays a major role particularly to perform biopsies that should be proposed in doubtful cases, unresectable locally advanced tumour, or before embarking in a neoadjuvant treatment for a potentially resectable tumour. There is still no available both robust and routinely available serum marker but trends in molecular biology may help to overpass this difficulty in the very next years. CA 19.9, taking into account its intrinsic limits, remains potentially useful in routine more in the assessment of therapeutic response under treatment than for the diagnosis, but should be replaced by more accurate biologic tools, such as circulating tumoral DNA.