Guest Editors:
Marcello Di Martino: Piemonte Orientale University, Hospital Maggiore della Carità, Italy
Michael El Boghdady: Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital, UK
Pancreatic cancer is among the most malignant in digestive diseases and the survival rate is among the lowest for all cancer types. Surgery offers the only realistic chance to cure, while pancreatic cancer lacks characteristic symptoms in the early stage and only 1 out of 5 patients is qualified for potential curative surgery at diagnose. When the cancer is too widespread to be removed completely, palliative surgery may be done to relieve symptoms or to prevent certain complications. The survival rate of pancreatic has been slightly increased over recent decades, and the improvements have been attributed primarily to improvements in the clinical recognition and diagnosis and development of multiagent cytotoxic therapies.
To recognize the surgeons’ efforts to improve survival and life quality of patients with pancreatic cancer, we have published a BMC Surgery collection on “Pancreatic cancer surgery”.