Last week, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek announced that he has been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. New York Times reporter Gina Kolata spoke with experts, including MSK’s Dr. William Jarnagin, to explain the diagnosis.

Most pancreatic tumors are adenocarcinomas, an aggressive cancer with a high risk of recurrence. It is hard to diagnose because the pancreas is located deep inside the body, making biopsies difficult, and the cancer’s symptoms are generally not felt until the cancer is at an advanced stage. In recent years, treatment (surgery when possible, chemotherapy, and sometimes radiation) has improved the median survival time to 54 months.

To learn more about pancreatic cancer, including clinical trials at MSK, visit MSK’s patient information page.

A recent New England Journal of Medicine study indicates that post-surgical combination chemotherapy is more effective in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer than the standard chemotherapy regimen. Researchers in Canada and France administered the combination chemotherapy, a modified FOLFIRINOX regimen, to 238 randomly selected eligible study participants and compared their outcomes to 243 participants receiving the standard post-surgical treatment, gemcitabine. On average, patients in the FOLFIRINOX group had 21.6 months of disease-free survival compared to 12.8 months in the gemcitabine group. In an Oncology Times article, MSK’s Dr. Alice Wei calls the study “practice changing.” The article notes that the chemotherapy regimen is not suitable for all pancreatic cancer patients, and that the combination chemotherapy can have more side effects.

A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that when women controlled the level of breast compression during mammography, image quality was not compromised. A French team studied 548 women, 275 of whom had mammography with self compression and 273 had standard mammography. Self-reported pain was lower in those with self compression, who only had an average three millimeter difference in compression compared to those with the standard test. In a Reuters Health report of the study, MSK’s Dr. Deborah Korenstein said that when women control compression, they may have more comfortable tests and be less likely to avoid mammograms in the future.