Article written by Ekaterina Pesheva, via https://hms.harvard.edu
By comparison, pancreatic cancer is harder and more expensive to screen and test for.
About 44 percent of people diagnosed in the early stages of pancreatic cancer survive five years after diagnosis, but only 12 percent of cases are diagnosed that early.
During the training, the algorithm discerned patterns indicative of future pancreatic cancer risk based on disease trajectories, that is, whether the patient had certain conditions that occurred in a certain sequence over time.
Less surprisingly, inflammation of the pancreas was strongly predictive of future pancreatic cancer within an even shorter time span of two years.
The researchers caution that none of these diagnoses by themselves should be deemed indicative or causative of future pancreatic cancer.