Welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I’m Lauren Davis, and joining me today is Dr. Shailesh Shrikhande, who is the professor and head of cancer surgery and the chief of GI and HPB surgery. He also serves as the director of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India. Dr. Shrikhande, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to be here on this podcast.
Today we’re talking about pancreatic cancer in India and the challenges of creating a surgical program to treat this cancer. Of the 18 million cancer diagnoses predicted worldwide in 2018, nearly half a million will be in pancreatic cancer. In India, the rates of pancreatic cancer are also on the rise. What do you attribute this increase to?
So I would like to answer this question in two parts. One is that pancreas cancer still remains an uncommon cancer in the Indian subcontinent as compared to the Western world or the Caucasian world and even the Far East. We do not really know the reasons as to why the incidence is quite low in the sense that in the United States the incidence is about 15 per 100,000, but in my country it’s about 4.1 per 100,000. So it’s about one third the incidence one sees in the United States.
Having said that, India is the second largest most populous country in the world. And we have clearly a large population with increasing awareness. So we have the urban population, and there is a 5% to 10% shift from the rural parts to the urban parts of India, and that’s where we start to see this cancer more and more than ever before.
So a decade ago, we definitely saw much less number of cancers which were pancreas and [INAUDIBLE] cancers. Now we see them in large numbers. The reasons are twofold. I think one is increasing awareness and widespread availability of diagnostics. Actually, even in not just in the metropolitan cities, but in tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 cities, and even in the smaller towns, you have much better imaging across India.
Listen to the ASCO Daily News Podcast on Dec 20, 2018: Episode on “Developing a Resectable Pancreatic Cancer Program in India with Dr. Shailesh Shrikhande”