Pancreatic cysts are fluid filled structures that can show up in the pancreas. The pancreas being an organ that's right in the middle of the abdomen. It's in the back of the abdomen and hard to access. These cysts can range from benign cysts to potentially pre malignant or pre cancerous cysts.
If a is found on your imaging, the first step I would say is not to panic. Most of these cysts don't have any chance of progressing to cancer and many of them we can actually watch without the need to have surgery. But if a cyst is found, it is worthwhile to pursue and make sure it's not one of these cysts that can progress the cancer. So I'd recommend coming in to see one of us here at Baptist and we can propose a workup to make sure that if it is one of these cysts that we have to worry about cancer, we can get you in to get it taken care of with surgery.
If not, the majority of the time we will kind of watch this closely, make sure things don't change. Pancreatic cancer is not usually associated with cysts, we are finding out that about ten to twenty percent are associated with some type of mucinous cyst. Typically those patients actually do better. There's thought that that's because we're catching these cysts early.
They're showing up on these tests and we're taking them out. So it is a target for us that we can prevent pancreas cancer even though the majority of pancreas cancers are not necessarily associated with cysts. Pancreatic cancer is one of the more aggressive cancers and any opportunity that we have to prevent it, we want to take that opportunity. The more we know about these cysts, more we can restratify them and potentially do a surgery that would prevent pancreatic cancer.
Whenever we have the opportunity to do that, we would like to take it.
